Industries of California

Ralph Stackpole; assisted by Thomas Hayes

Here is the other side of industry in California from Maxine Albro's rural farming and orchards on the east wall. This is factory work: assembly lines, blast furnaces, chemical works and laboratories. The industries represented here - petroleum refining, sugar processing, fruit and vegetable canning, laboratory work, steelmaking some of the largest and most important industries in the Bay Area at the time (there was a huge sugar refinery at the foot of Potrero Hill, massive steelworks across the Bay, and "The Cannery" mall was once an active fruit canning plant, while oil refining remains a huge business in Richmond). We see labor working together harmoniously and productively. 

But also notice that the faces, the human forms, are not nearly as lifelike as the other nearby murals (although he included recognizable likenesses of Helen Clement as a cannery worker and William Hesthal bending over a notebook). Stackpole was an exceptionally talented sculptor, but he had never before done a mural. His approach was to render his knowledge of three-dimensional sculpture into the flat mural on the wall. So what ends up coming to life is the industrial equipment and process - pipes, pumps, boilers, all take on almost living form. This was one of the last murals to be completed; Stackpole signed the work on May 17, 1934 

Stackpole composed this work roughly to correspond with an early sketch of "Man at the Crossroads" that he had gotten from Rivera. That sketch had significant differences from Rivera's final sketch for the work, but it was probably the only representation available to the San Francisco artists at the time. Like Rivera, he used the inanimate objects in the painting to define his space and guide the viewer's eyes.