Humanities and Public Life

Art, Action, and Remembering the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Ruth Sergel

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781609384180
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art général

2017 American Book Award Winner from the Before Columbus Foundation  In 1911, a fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City took the lives of 146 workers, most of them young immigrant women and girls. Their deaths galvanized a movement for social and economic justice then, but today's laborers continue to battle dire working conditions. How can we bring the lessons of the Triangle fire back into practice today? For artist Ruth Sergel, the answer was to fuse art, activism, and collective memory to create a large-scale public commemoration that invites broad participation and incites civic engagement. See You in the Streets showcases her work.It all began modestly in 2004 with Chalk, an invitation to all New Yorkers to remember the 146 victims of the fire by inscribing their names and ages in chalk in front of their former homes. This project inspired Sergel to found the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, a broad alliance of artists and activists, universities and unions—more than 250 partners nationwide—to mark the 2011 centennial of the infamous blaze. Putting the coalition together and figuring what to do and how to do it were not easy. This book provides a lively account of the unexpected partnerships, false steps, joyous collective actions, and sustainability of such large public works. Much more than an object lesson from the past, See You in the Streets offers an exuberant perspective on building a social art practice and doing public history through argument and agitation, creativity and celebration with an engaged public. 

Table of contents

• Contents
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Postcard: I Would Be a Traitor to Those Poor Burned Bodies, by Rose Schneiderman
• Postcard: What We Celebrate, Why We Celebrate, by Esther Cohen
• Welcome
• The Fire
• Postcard: Leon Stein and The Triangle Fire, by Cheryl Beredo
• Chalk
• Postcard: Chalk’s Visual Histories, by Ellen Wiley Todd
• Craft
• Postcard: Lessons to Be Learned from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, by Adrienne Andi Sosin and Joel Sosinsky
• Voices of 9.11
• Postcard: Reform from Tragedy, by Richard A. Greenwald
• Start Your Engines
• Postcard: Postcard from the Revolution and Its Sad Aftermath, by Annelise Orleck
• Solidarity
• Postcard: The Garment Workers’ Union and the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition, by May Y. Chen and Sherry Kane
• Radical Tolerance
• Postcard: Guide to Accessible Event Planning, by Emma Rosenthal
• Fair Exchange
• Postcard: Making Space for Conversation, by Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani and Kaushik Panchal, Buscada
• Leadership
• Postcard: Ancestral Imperatives, by Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
• Difficult Memory
• Postcard: In Memory, by Suzanne Pred Bass
• Memorial
• Postcard: At the Corner of Washington Place and Greene, by Mary Anne Trasciatti
• Sustainability (A Rant)
• Postcard: The Treasurer’s Lament, by Sheryl Woodruff
• Acts of Return
• Postcard: Art Is the Path from Reality to the Soul, by LuLu LoLo
• The Centennial
• Postcard: Riding Memory, by Elissa Sampson
• See You in the Streets
• Acknowledgments
• Appendix A: Want to Learn More?
• Appendix B: The Remember the Triangle Fire Coalition
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index