MANCHESTER, NH.- For more than a century, the American city has had an undeniable allure for artists. Urban Landscapes: Manchester and the Modern American City, on view at the Currier Museum of Art from Saturday, June 11 through Sunday, August 29, 2016, explores many of the qualities of the urban environment that have proven irresistible. Taken primarily from the Currier’s collection, the exhibition includes works covering more than 100 years by artists such as Berenice Abbott, Gary Winogrand, Charles Sheeler, John Sloan and others. Also on view are more recent works by Richard Estes, Nicholas Nixon, Catherine Opie and Abelardo Morell.

The works in this exhibition, many of which are new acquisitions that are on view for the first time at the Currier, range from realistic to abstract and romantic to gritty. There are some familiar scenes, such as Manchester’s Amoskeag Mills and the skyscrapers of New York City, but equally fascinating are everyday street scenes that provide insight into the diverse experiences of city-dwellers. The exhibition contains paintings, photographs, prints and videos.

“These images of metropolitan living make for an extraordinary visual history of the exciting social and technological changes that occurred in American cities in the 20th century,” said Kurt Sundstrom, exhibition curator. “The artists in the exhibition presented their subjects with an honesty and realism rarely seen before, often aiming to place the viewer in the scene.”

The show consists of more than 100 objects anchored by three themes:

People in the City
Starting during the Industrial Revolution, population density had a strong affect on city life. The influx of individuals from rural areas and the immigrants needed to support the new economy permanently changed the character of the urban landscape. Artists embraced these opportunities to show people living their lives in such close proximity, with little opportunity for privacy. John Sloan (1871-1951), painter and etcher, unabashedly revealed this new reality in Love on the Roof (1914), his then-racy depiction of a couple embracing on a rooftop, surrounded by billowing hung laundry, while a toddler sits at their feet.

City as Stage for Activism
Cities became the backdrop for the strengthening civil rights movement, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. African-American soldiers returning from World War II, where they fought side-by-side with white soldiers, expected to be treated as equals at home, as did their families. When that expectation was shattered by centuries-old institutional racism, minorities took to the streets in mass demonstrations and strikes to demand social and financial equality. I Am A Man (1968), a photograph by Ernest Withers (1922-2007), captures one of the most important moments of the civil rights movement, when Memphis Sanitation Workers went on strike, citing discrimination and dangerous working conditions. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination later that year intensified the anger and despair as riots broke out in cities across the country.

Prior to this, the worker’s rights movements of the 1920s and 1930s pitted the large corporations against their workers. The massive demonstrations in favor of unionization and safer working conditions forever changed the relationship between employee and business owner.

Modern Architecture and the City
In order to accommodate population growth in the new urban economy, radical changes were necessary. Businesses required substantially more office space and celebrated their success by building skyscrapers, which were essentially massive monuments to themselves. Apartments sprung up to house the influx of workers and multi-story, multi-family dwellings became the norm as limited land forced the urban landscape to grow vertically. Roads and bridges were built at a furious pace, creating the infrastructure to handle the needs of businesses and their employees.

Artists celebrated these fast-changing engineering achievements by treating the new structures as abstract objects, focusing on discrete elements of the whole, thus separating form from function. In concentrating on details, they turned the everyday into fascinating angular or curvaceous geometric structures. Later, artists such as painter and photographer Charles Sheeler revealed the other side of the city when factories closed after World War II, as the economy shifted focus.