A few of our stories and columns are now in front of the paywall. We at The Chief remain committed to independent reporting on labor and civil service. It's been our mission since 1897. You can have a hand in ensuring that our reporting remains relevant in the decades to come. Consider supporting The Chief, which you can do for as little as $3.20 a month.
Before Tabitha Arnold found her own way as an artist, she tried to unionize her workplace. The Tennessee native studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy for Fine Art and after graduating took a job at Green Line Cafe in Philadelphia and honed her artistic work in her free time.
Over the course of a year, Arnold struggled with her coworkers to form a union. They finally reached majority support, but only just before the cafe closed at the outset of the pandemic. Arnold never returned to the cafe, but throughout the unionization campaign her work — which had shifted from painting to tapestry weaving — began to reflect her experience as a worker and unionist.
The campaign changed the way she saw the world and her art, Arnold said in an interview last week, and she found that her coworkers and those around her began to respond to the themes of labor and class struggle that the Chattanooga native stitched into her art to comfort herself during the loneliest times of the unionization campaign.
“People around me really responded to this work and it felt like there was a need for contemporary labor art,” Arnold said. "I really got started with becoming myself as an artist because I was a labor organizer.”
This month, three of Arnold’s recent towering tapestries are on display inside the Field Projects gallery in Chelsea. “Gospel of the Working Class,” curated by Jacob Rhodes, runs through Oct. 4 during the height of gallery season.
The three works: “I Walk,” “Mill Town" and “These Hands” picture, respectively, a 1918 Chattanooga trolley carmen's strike, a 1934 textile workers strike and the unionization of a Volkswagen plant with the United Auto Workers in Chattanooga last year. The works — each of which took Arnold more than 200 hours to create — are an homage to Chattanooga’s workers, the artist said, and weave together contemporary and historic labor battles in her hometown.
She created “These Hands” — a reference to an organizing video produced by the United Auto Workers —in the lead up to the historic April 2024 union election where more than 70 percent of voting workers at the only non-union Volkswagen plant in the world voted to join the UAW. Arnold had followed the organizing campaign closely and finished the tapestry a week before the election, debuting it at a community solidarity rally with workers from the factory.
The point of installing “These Hands” together with those detailing two earlier Chattanooga struggles was to "ground it in the history of Chattanooga, basically as an argument that the Volkswagen UAW drive is not this thing that’s happening out of nowhere with no precedent,” Arnold explained.
'Political education'
“Mill Town” was created after “These Hands” and includes the slogan “We shall not be moved,” which Arnold said was first incorporated as a labor solidarity chant in Chattanooga during the 1934 garment worker's strike after enforcers hired by the company fired lethal rounds at workers. Arnold then made “I Walk,” which depicts a little-known series of strikes, riots and labor actions by Chattanooga trolley carmen in the 1910s.
She sees the three works as a “political education project” that she hopes will help enshrine symbols of the modern labor movement "so people can connect to them and feel like they're a part of something."
All three include religious imagery such as halos and angels that Arnold said reflects her upbringing in a split Presbyterian and Eastern Orthodox home in the Bible Belt. Her inspiration comes from a number of places, she said, including the tactile nature of Ann Hamilton’s work, the worker-focused art of socialist Diego Rivera as well as Chilean arpillera art, Afghan war rugs and Palestinian liberation art that explores themes of martyrdom, resistance and bodily sacrifice.
Rhodes, himself a former textile artist who helped open the Field Projects gallery, said Arnold’s art reflects the values he believes in and hopes to show in the gallery.
“We want to make a space available for everybody in Chelsea,” the curator told The Chief during the show's Sept. 4 opening reception.. “We want to show people who usually aren’t represented in Chelsea.”
The opening, crowded and hot, drew dozens involved in the city’s labor movement alongside New Yorkers who dropped by while touring Chelseas’s numerous galleries. In between pats on the back and conversations with friends and admirers of her art, Arnold told The Chief she was “blown away” by the support she had received, and that she had not expected as many people to show up for her first show in the city as did.
The day before the viewing, Arnold said she hoped her work would encourage workers organizing their workplaces to feel less alone. Soon after finishing “These Hands,” Arnold learned that employees in her old workplace Green Line Cafe voted to unionize, and that some of the former coworkers she had helped organize when she worked there were involved in the successful union push.
“I want this show to function as proof or encouragement that labor struggle is ... if you're fighting for it, wherever you are you're not alone in space or in time,” Arnold said. “Class struggle is happening everywhere. If people feel as alone as I did at some points as an organizer, I want them to feel like that solidarity is there whether they see it every day or not."
“Gospel of the Working Class,” is on view through Oct. 4 at the Field Projects gallery, 526 West 26th St., eighth floor.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here