Miners Going to Work (a.k.a. Going into the Mines) - WPA

Blanche Grambs

Blanche Grambs' 49 graphic works were done in a six year period for the Works Project Administration (WPA) between 1934 and 1939, where she produced a group of powerful social commentaries, a number of which were portraits. Grambs has not been included in many of the publications that chronicle the artists of the Depression and works by women artists, and that is an oversight. An article about her and a raisonné of her work was done by James Weschler for Print Quarterly, volume 13, number 4, 1996, pages 376-396.

Weschler notes about this work: "Since wages for their dangerous occupation guaranteed a severely inadequate living standard, the average worker found himself trapped in a perpetual cycle, with no hope of ever improving his life....Grambs comments on this bleak situation through the continuous succession of dispirited, faceless workers who march like troops of walking wounded into the tomb-like mineshaft."

The aquatint, "Miners Going to Work", has the New York WPA stamp and is pencil signed by the artist. This image is in the collection of many WPA repositories, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Grambs work focused on the plight of the American worker.