Last week, as I was lecturing on photography, I showed my students the work of Lewis Hine. Issues of labor, and factory labor in particular, are implicit in the Local Industry exhibition, but were particularly fresh in my mind as I went to the museum on Sunday. I have never worked in a factory, so I have a mingle of ideas about what factory labor is, was, would be like based on various fictional and non-fictional accounts. When I first arrived at the museum on Sunday, Nick DeFord was adding bobbins onto the spectrum wall, Chris Molinski was making quills along with Michael Milano (whose lecture I sadly missed Saturday) and other visitors were making bobbins and chatting amiably. There was a level of comfort and familiarity that felt very much like a work environment, different people working on different tasks with a common purpose. I suppose my romance with this factory setting made me realize that my day to day life, over the past year, is much more solitary than was my life during graduate school, or my previous jobs.
I settled into winding my bobbins, enjoying the camaraderie, and thinking more about factory life. After Chris, Nick and Michael left the exhibit, it was quiet for a few moments, and then a woman with four children came into the space. And soon after that, another woman and her child arrived as well. All the children actively wanted to wind the bobbins. I thought about how exuberantly and readily children participate and express their excitement, as opposed to the more reserved interest we express as adults. One of the volunteers helped the children pick out spools of thread, got them started winding, and away they went. They looked on at each others' progress, helped one another and when finished with one bobbin announced to one another that they were starting a second bobbin.
It is a reward to me, as I go to the museum week after week, to always see visitors at the exhibit, and even better, visitors that are excited about the project. I feel a sense of pride for Anne, for the KMA, for art in general, as I watch people engage in the space. As I watched these kids wind, and wind and wind I also felt grateful that this experience was a novelty to them. I thought of the Lewis Hine photographs, of young children working in textile mills, only a hundred years ago, not for the joy of spinning a bobbin, but by force of others or circumstance. I tried not to get mired in thoughts of the many children across the world that are still exploited as a labor. Instead, I concentrated on the gratitude I felt in having a Sunday afternoon free to wind some colorful bobbins, and watch a group of children help make art.
