museum show

At the MOMA, there is an exhibit of murals, by Diego Rivera, commissioned by the museum for a show, in December 1931. Three more frescos were added, in January 1932, which "depict labor and construction in depression-era New York." The following is my favorite, both for its simple--yet powerful--perspective, and for its contemporary relevance: 

"In Frozen Assets, Rivera coupled his appreciation for New York’s distinctive vertical architecture with a potent critique of the city's economic inequities. The panel’s upper register features a dramatic sequence of largely recognizable skyscrapers, most completed within a few years of Rivera’s arrival in New York. In the middle section, a steel-and-glass shed serves as a shelter for rows of sleeping men, pointing to the dispossessed labor that made such extraordinary growth possible during a period of economic turmoil. Below, a bank’s waiting room accommodates a guard, a clerk, and a trio of figures eager to inspect their mounting assets in the vault beyond. Rivera’s jarring vision of the city—in which the masses trudge to work, the homeless are warehoused, and the wealthy squirrel away their money—struck a chord in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression."

The Museum of Modern Art
November 13, 2011–May 14, 2012