Allison Kemmerer Shows "Industrial Strength" by Carol Williams

Fellow IGC member (a.k.a. Curator of Photography and Art After 1950) Allison Kemmerer has curated a terrific show, titled "Industrial Strength", at the Addison Gallery. Don’t miss it!  Beautiful images – mostly photographs, along with some drawings, paintings, and lithographs – evoke a broad spectrum of emotions about industry in America from the late 19th century through the present. The main images I carry away in my head are of the bridges, especially a Walker Evans series on the Brooklyn Bridge, in which the geometric images look almost abstract.
Some of the most moving pieces are of people. Winslow Homer’s New England Factory Life: Bell Time, from an 1869 Harper’s Weekly, shows hundreds of weary workers walking home, and the winding mass of stumbling people snakes back to the horizon. 
Justin Kirchoff’s five-panel Sewing Room, Lawrence includes so much loving detail about the work and workers that looking at it becomes a kind of Where’s Waldo experience: bundles of pant legs stand beside a chair with a woman’s lacy sweater draped over the back, and Christmas decorations hang above industrial-sized ironing boards and bobbins. This one is oddly comforting, because the individuality of the workers is evidenced all over the workroom.  Others stand out for their astonishing beauty – lush green undergrowth in Rackstraw Downes’ Henry Hudson Bridge Substructure is a startling contrast to the hard lines of the looming bridge.

And Hopper’s Railroad Train is gorgeous, with the train trailing smoke as it runs right out of the frame. Much of the show is of the industrial east, and the ones of the industrial west are almost refreshing. The Thomas Hart Benton painting of cattle loading verges on being a cartoon, or a children’s book illustration, and a line of grain silos dwarfs the lone human being down at the bottom. 
"Industrial Strength" is a fine complement to the Whistler show, with all those bridges. Go see it! http://www.andover.edu/Museums/Addison/Exhibitions/IndustrialStrength/Pages/default.aspx