Ralph Fasanella’s paintings
always feature people: people in the city, people
in parades, people attending sports games, or
people gathering in union halls. Diverse nationalities
and races mingle on his canvases. He is well known
for his large, colorful paintings about labor
history.
Ralph Fasanella grew up during
a period of rapid change in industry and during
the Great Depression. As a child, he accompanied
his mother to the garment shop where she worked
as a buttonhole maker. “Dress Shop”
depicts the factory in which his mother worked.
Ralph learned about politics and organizing by
watching his mother work in progressive and anti-fascist
political movements in the Italian-American community.
As a grown man, Ralph devoted himself to the reemerging
trade union movement in the 1930s and ‘40s.
He successfully helped to organize firefighters,
elevator operators and hospital workers into a
number of unions and occupational groups. He was
a member and organizer of the United Electrical
Workers (UEW). He also helped UEW organize workers
at General Electric, Sperry Gyroscope and American
Telephone and Telegraph.
Through these paintings Fasanella
intertwined his devotion to art and labor, using
a canvas to extend his work organizing for labor
and opposing social injustice. Two years of research
preceded his famous depictions of the Bread and
Roses Strike of 1912 in Lawrence Massachusetts.
His painting career spanned forty years and produced
hundreds of canvases. Today, the paintings give
workers an appreciation for labor struggles and
to encourage them to continue fighting to improve
their lives.
Fasanella began painting in his
middle years. In the mid-1940’s, a union
co-worker suggested Fasanella take a course in
art as therapy to alleviate pain in his fingers.
However, because he felt more comfortable in a
machine shop than in an art classroom, Fasanella
preferred to teach himself to paint. Art quickly
became a passion and eventually Fasanella quit
his job in the union to paint. He supported himself
by working at his brother’s gas station.
Then, in 1974, when he began to gain recognition,
he began painting full-time while his family subsisted
on his wife’s salary as a schoolteacher.
Ralph Fasanella died in 1997. He is survived by
his wife, Eva Lazorek Fasanella and two children,
Marc and Gina.
Burr & Smith obtained the
information for this article from the website
for the Bread and Roses Cultural Project at http://www.bread-and-roses.com/bio.html;
an article posted on http://miculturelink,h-net.msu.edu/curricula/painter.html;
and an article provided to us by the artist’s
wife, entitled “The Urban Vision of Ralph
Fasanella,” written by Suzette Lane McAvoy
and Paul D’Ambrosio.
