Industry and Idleness

The duality of business and pleasure characterizes both printmaking and one of its greatest inspirations—New York City. In a selection of prints made from the 1880s to the 1980s, Industry and Idleness explores the spaces and activities in which these seemingly opposed pursuits converge. The maps, advertisements, newspapers, Works Progress Administration projects, and other prints on display here look at New York—its people, places, and activities—as a site where the commercial and cultural converge as inevitably as the practical and personal do in prints of all kinds.

The prints in this exhibition are drawn from the collections of the Museum of the City of New York and represent a sampling of its tens of thousands of prints that depict New York and New Yorkers over more than three centuries. Industry and Idleness was created through a collaboration between the Museum and International Print Center New York, a non-profit institution devoted solely to the exhibition and understanding of fine art prints.  The exhibition was originally presented at International Print Center New York, 526 West 26th Street, from March 9th through April 23rd, 2005.

Image: Carlos Anderson, Curtain Time, (detail) c.1935, Lithograph, 16 x 23 inches, Gift of NYC W.P.A. Art Project