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The number of people who were alive when heavy industry collapsed in Western Pennsylvania shrinks daily. But while some old mill sites now host sprawling shopping complexes and apartment buildings, the past isn’t fully past. Slag heaps have been paved over with now-defunct malls and still-thriving subdivisions. Yet the ghosts of those putative glory days live on in the rhetoric of politicians promising manufacturing’s revival here, along with, presumably, the sense of identity and purpose that came with it.
The region’s industrial past is also the subject, in very different ways, of three new exhibits at Pitt’s University Art Gallery, which is led by Sylvia Rhor Samaniego. “Broken Ground” samples historical and contemporary images of labor and the land. “Rewilding” visits former golf courses returned to nature. And “Joe Magarac Returns” explores the history and afterlife of a somewhat ambiguous steel-making folk hero.
The Magarac exhibit feels especially pointed. Magarac is Pittsburgh’s answer to Paul Bunyan, a tireless, 7-foot-tall mill worker who in some versions of his story melted himself down to make more steel. His image — including a statue outside U.S. Steel’s Edgar Thomson Works in Braddock — is usually based on a cartoonish 1947 oil painting by William Gropper that shows the blond giant grinning triumphantly while bending a red-hot steel beam with his bare hands.
That painting was the seed for this show, which also includes items ranging from a 1931 issue of Scribner’s Magazine — Magarac’s first appearance in print — to a 1951 plaster cast of sculptor Frank Vittor’s proposal for the yet-unbuilt Point State Park Fountain: a 100-foot-tall sculpture in aluminum, steel and bronze, topped by Joe himself.
It’s all paired with “Resounding Omissions,” new work by local artist Quaishawn Whitlock exploring the resonances between Magarac’s story and that of John Henry, the Black railroad worker who legend has it died racing a steam drill to bore through a mountain.
But while John Henry might well have been based on a real person, Magarac’s tale is likely not even real folklore. Evidence for Magarac in the oral tradition is nearly nonexistent. Meanwhile, as exhibit text notes, “Magarac” in South Slavic languages means “jackass,” so Joe’s story could have been an ironic joke Pittsburgh steelworkers played on Scribner’s writer Owen Francis. Or it could have grown from mill-floor chops-busting: Guys calling each other jackasses who did nothing but eat and work.
The layers of meaning were seemingly lost on, or discarded by, corporate America. The UAG exhibit displays mid-century magazine ads lionizing Magarac from Shell Oil and even the John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Company. (Who thought that was a good idea? “So, Mr. Magarac, you’d like to buy some life insurance. And you plan to do what now at work?”)
In short, some have concluded that whatever his origins, Magarac was speedily co-opted as management’s idea of a good worker, selflessly devoted to production (and certainly not interested in labor unions).
While “Joe Magarac Returns” interrogates local industrial mythology, “Broken Ground” and “Rewilding” feel more contemplative.
The former prominently features several sketches by Fletcher Martin, including some made 1,000 feet deep in a Wilkes-Barre coal mine in 1946-47. The prosaic yet heroic images of laborers echo those in the woodcuts of Claire Leighton, who documented the lives of farmers and other rural laborers starting in the ’20s.
And Pittsburgh-based artist Sarah Moore’s “Rewilding” is a seven-channel video work screened on the wall of the gallery’s rotunda, depicting six former golf courses in the Eastern U.S. The still or slowly panning camera gazes at meadows and woods, and at ponds that might be old retention pools; the scenes are conspicuously unpopulated by the sort of creatures who once swung a 5 iron there.
But the legacy of heavy industry plays out in many ways. Vittor’s model for the Point fountain, for instance, is on loan from Rivers of Steel Heritage Corporation, the nonprofit that manages the Carrie Blast Furnaces National Historic Landmark. The site, which sprawls along the Mon in Swissvale and Rankin, is home to the remnants of the U.S. Steel complex that until about 40 years ago made pig iron to be shipped across the river to be made into steel.
Rivers of Steel holds historic tours, arts workshops and community events. One of the latter is the annual Festival of Combustion, which takes place in the shadow of the region’s only two remaining nonoperative blast furnaces.
This year’s festival was Saturday, and some 2,300 visitors showed up to check out area metalsmiths, glassblowers and more, including an iron pour by workers whose protective suits and face shields recalled the mill hands who labored there for decades. Visitors were free to wander the site, crunching ancient blast-furnace slag underfoot and perusing crumbling concrete walls and arrays of huge machine parts long separated from their functions.
Today, even in Pittsburgh, ours is largely a world of desk work and service-industry jobs. Connections to the industrial past feel increasingly tenuous. The temptation to mythologize it — or bury it — is strong. The trick is to keep looking.
