Frances Jetter: Amalgam

Frances Jetter’s Amalgam is an illustrated history of the life and times of her immigrant labor unionist grandfather who left Poland in 1911 when it was still part of the Russian Empire. Although the Russian Army no longer conscripted twelve-year-old Jewish children to serve thirty-one year-long tours of duty, her grandfather chose to evade their draft. After finding work as a pocket maker in a New York garment factory, he became a foot soldier in America’s army of labor, and spent his life fighting for a living wage. Amalgam focuses on his dual roles as a union member advocating for democracy in the workplace, and as a dictatorial patriarch of his Brooklyn family, waging a war against frivolity and toys. This powerful illustrated book contrasts old world ways with the desire to assimilate, and follows the family and the union through the Great Depression and World War II to the 1960s, and the union’s decline. The artist’s sequential narrative is cut from linoleum, with some imagery featuring complex chine collé additions from lithographic or digital prints.

A labor of love, Amalgam has been under construction for almost a decade, and is extraordinary among her extensive body of work, which includes prints, artist’s books, and drawings focusing on political and socially-significant subject matter. Her images have illustrated articles in the New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME, The Nation, the Village Voice, The Progressive, and others. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is featured in the permanent collections of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, Detroit Institute of Arts, The New York Public Library, and Grinnell College Print and Drawing Study Room, Grinnell, Iowa. Her artist’s books are included in the Library of Congress’ Rare Books and Special Collections, The New York Public Library’s Spencer Collection, and in numerous public and private collections. She is the recent recipient of a New York Public Library Fellowship, which enabled her to expand and complete Amalgam, which will be on view along with process works from the book and unique mementos of her family’s life.