In 1931, the two-year-old Museum of Modern Art planned a show that would feature the work of Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Known for his socially critical murals in Mexico City, Rivera hunkered down inside a museum studio and created five new murals for the exhibition.
One of those murals, “Frozen Assets,” caused a stir at the time. It was the depths of the Great Depression, and Rivera had something to say about how the city treats its assets.
“The panel’s upper register features a dramatic sequence of largely recognizable skyscrapers, most completed within a few years of Rivera’s arrival in New York,” states this caption on MOMA’s website.
“In the middle section, a steel-and-glass shed serves as a shelter for rows of sleeping men, pointing to the dispossessed labor that made such extraordinary growth possible during a period of economic turmoil. Below, a bank’s waiting room accommodates a guard, a clerk, and a trio of figures eager to inspect their mounting assets in the vault beyond.”
That shelter Rivera depicted was the Municipal Lodging House, built in 1909 on a pier on East 25th Street for indigent men, women, and children.
“Rivera’s jarring vision of the city—in which the masses trudge to work, the homeless are warehoused, and the wealthy squirrel away their money—struck a chord in 1932, in the midst of the Great Depression,” states MOMA.
MOMA exhibited Frozen Assets and other works by Rivera in 2011, also a year of rising concern about economic equality.
Tags: art in New York City, Depression-era New York City, Diego Rivera Frozen Assets, Diego Rivera in New York City, Diego Rivera MOMA, Diego Rivera murals, homeless shelter New York City, Municipal Lodging House New York City, Social Realism painters
Ephemeral New York 
March 19, 2013 at 11:54 am |
I saw that MOMA exhibit and Frozen Assets was still causing a stir. I saw the exhibit a few times and this mural always drew the biggest crowd of people.
March 25, 2013 at 8:32 pm |
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January 20, 2014 at 8:00 am |
[…] its place, the city housed homeless men on a barge in the East River, and then in 1909, at the Municipal Lodging House on East 25th Street and the East […]