ROCHESTER: A COMMUNITY OF WORKERS PHOTO EXHIBIT
Web access to photos and text from the exhibit at:
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About the Exhibit
From the outset the Community of Workers project was intended to result in an exhibition
at the Links Gallery in Rochester’s City Hall and in a publication.
The gallery exhibition was organized as a series of 26 panels, each containing photographs
and text from one of the worksites documented in 1990. (It should be noted that the excerpts
from interviews were not intended as captions and were not necessarily attributable to workers
in the photos: often the text material came from others at the worksite).
The exhibition panels were arranged in the sequence in which worksites were documented,
to avoid seeming to favor any work or union. The exhibit thus followed the sequence of the
project’s unfolding, at once random and organic.
The exhibit was displayed at the Links Gallery from October 2 through November 5, 1990.
It was well received and soon the Labor Council had requests from local schools to bring
the exhibit to their “Career Days.” A portable version of the exhibit enabled the Council
to honor these requests.
“Rochester: A Community of Workers”
also began to be shown at functions of the Labor
Council and its affiliates, as well as at labor conferences in Detroit, Pittsburgh,
Washington, DC and Albany, New York.
As teachers became familiar with the exhibition they wanted to use its images
in the classroom, leading the artist, Marilyn Anderson, to translate
30 of them into drawings for a coloring book. “Our Community of Workers Coloring Book,”
published in 1995, is now in its fifth printing and nearly 45,000 copies have been
distributed nationally.
Meanwhile the artists continued their documentation, visiting three additional worksites
in 1991, five in 1992, and three more in 1993. While images from these sites were included
in the coloring book and appeared in the Labor Council’s sesquicentennial publication,
they were not added to the exhibition as attention turned to plans for printing them as a book.
By this time, however, the Council’s Education Committee had already launched
this website, RochesterLabor.org, and it was decided to publish
the exhibit electronically. This on-line exhibit, then, is the first to contain images
and text from all the worksites documented as part of the Community of Workers project.
Since the early ’90s changes have occurred at many worksites and unions: some of
these changes are briefly noted in the exhibit pages and are more fully discussed
in the Update section.
This project has benefited from considerable support of many kinds:
- The documentation process was facilitated by the Rochester Labor Council,
which understood the importance of depicting, to both union members and
the general public, the community of work; by the many unions which
participated in the project and their members who agreed to be
photographed and interviewed; and by the employers who granted access
to worksites.
- The project, including the gallery exhibition, received financial assistance
not only from the Labor Council but from the New York State Council on
the Arts Decentralization Program, administered in Monroe County by Arts
for Greater Rochester.
- This on-line exhibit is made possible with support from the Ronald G.
Pettengill Labor Education Fund, a component of the Rochester Area
Community Foundation, through grants from the New York State
Department of Education.
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