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East Side Soap Box
Ben Shahn
1936
Image
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The painter and graphic artist Ben Shahn was born in Kovno (Kaunas, Lithuania) and, in 1909, came to New York City, where he received formal training in art. From the late 1920s until about 1950, he worked in a social realist tradition, attacking injustice, prejudice, and brutality. During the Great Depression, he was employed as a photographer by the Farm Security Administration to document the unemployed and the poor, government homestead projects, and rural, small-town life. After 1950, his work became more allegorical and symbolic, and he turned increasingly to producing illustrated Hebrew texts.
This calligraphic print appears in Ben Shahn’s book Alphabet of Creation, based on a tale about how God created the world through the letters of the Hebrew alphabet taken from the Zohar, a thirteenth…
Red Stripe Kitchen is from Martha Rosler’s Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, a series created to protest the Vietnam War and the ways in which Americans distance themselves from violence…
This drawing of a gathering hosted by Dr. Hermann Adler, the chief rabbi of Great Britain (wearing a yarmulke and standing at right), represents the adaptation of the British custom of high tea to the…