During the 1930s and 1940s the International Ladies Garment Workers Union’s education department, inspired by Fania Cohn and Mark Starr, conducted hundreds of classes for workers, some of them in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This rare image of Local 91 members in an art workshow shows students actually drawing, rather than posing in front of the building, and evokes the spirit of intense creative effort that characterized those classes.

More of this story is told in Cultural Initiatives – The Union Meets the Met, a section of the Labor Arts exhibit The ILGWU: Social Unionism in Action.