Curator, Leah Dickerman: In this fresco panel you can see Rivera's beginning to experiment with this contrast between the above ground world and underground world, or here between an exterior world and an interior world.
The upper portion of the composition pictures a view over a river towards a skyline that resembles New York.
And then the larger, lower portion of the composition shows a structure—the façade is stripped away—in which you see three chambers, and within each of these chambers is a worker who’s holding an electrified tool.
So what you have here are powerful bodies, who are amplified by tools that are powered by electricity, and together they build a plant that, in turn, generates power.
Rivera later said it was a GE plant, but GE didn’t have a plant in New York City at the time. So, this is Rivera’s imagined view of the city. There was a tremendous interest in a hydroelectric power. 1931 is the moment in which construction of Hoover Dam begins, to great publicity. And this is Rivera’s imagining of the combination of the great metropolis of New York and the potential of hydroelectric power.
New York City is imagined as a city under construction, a city that’s infinitely pliable, growing rapidly, that could become the utopian world with the worker at the center that Rivera hopes to achieve.