Remember who you are. Remember where you came from. Change the world.
—Epitaph, gravemarker for Ralph Fasanella

Ralph Fasanella’s New York City is a crowded, boisterous, diverse, hardworking, and hard playing place—a tough crust with a soft center. He was raised in a largely Italian immigrant neighborhood, in the shadow of impending world war. His father struggled to make ends meet as an ice-delivery man, and his mother was a garment worker on the Lower East Side. She was a woman with progressive views who advocated for anti-fascist and pro-trade union causes. Fasanella himself was an energetic, rambunctious, and aggressive boy. He became increasingly difficult as he grew older, graduating to petty crimes that landed him in the constricting environment of a Catholic reform school. He might have continued on this troubled path if not for his mother’s influence. She urged him to funnel his passion, strong work ethic, and empathy with working-class values and culture into action. Fasanella became highly political—his philosophy of life constructed between the wars and the forces that were threatening the democratic model in which he deeply believed. He joined the anti-fascist movement in Spain, advocated rigorously on behalf of labor unions, and became an organizer for many years. In 1945, Fasanella began to experience a tingling sensation in his hands. As therapy, he began to draw and, ultimately, to paint. In his minutely detailed yet increasingly monumental and sweeping scenes, he found a new outlet for his political activism and dreams of a fair shake for all in blunt visual critiques of post–World War II America. This canvas highlights Coney Island as an ideal of working-class culture—a mecca open to all and sundry on a hot summer day. Shedding the grit and worries of city life, Fasanella’s vision offers a happy polyglot of people and amusements just out of reach on the other side of the ocean. But how to reach that happy place? A stream of cars queues into a long tunnel that abruptly ends at the shoreline, funneling the passengers into the water with no indication how they might emerge on the other side. The cheerful scene assumes a darker aspect as the playful promise of Coney Island, once a privileged escape and later a playground for the masses, still remains out of reach for so many. The vista collapses three separate entities into a single, impossible frame: the city of tenements and churches on one side, the beach on the other, and the ocean in between.

Stacy C. Hollander, “Workers’ Holiday—Coney Island, 1965,” exhibition brochure for American Perspectives: Stories from the American Folk Art Museum Collection (New York: American Folk Art Museum, 2020).

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