By Peggy Roalf Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Anthony Freda: The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing, opens at the Carbon County Cultural Center on Saturday, June 20, at 5:30 pm. The 5-Day Storytelling Workshop, which runs from June 22 – 26 at the CCCC, still has room for a few more artists. Please check websites for information and registration.
Anthony Freda, a painter and illustrator known for seamlessly incorporating 19th-century artifacts and ephemera into his work, has made the 19th century part of his daily life as well. Formerly based in New York, where he says, “I rarely went north of 14th Street during my last few years there,” now lives in one of the best-preserved Victorian towns in America. Several years ago, following the birth of his son, Anthony and his wife Amber decided they needed to breathe better air. They drew a circle with a 200-mile radius around the city and one day, they drove to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, at the time just a dot on the map.
“I knew nothing about the place and was amazed to find this town where you could really sense its railroading and coal mining history just by walking around. It’s set in a valley, where some of the important buildings from its glory days still stand, surrounded by mountains, where the railroad magnates built their mansions. There’s not a MacDonald’s anywhere to spoil the views.” The town was home to 13 bona fide millionaires, including Asa Packer, the third richest man in the country. His 11,000-square-foot Italianate villa, built in 1861, is open to the public.
“Jim Thorpe was really a microcosm of America’s industrial history,” said Freda, “the good, the bad, and the ugly. The miners were so badly paid they were forced to send their children to work. There are so many stories about the dichotomy between the rich and the poor that we decided to do a workshop on narrative art here.”
One of Freda’s paintings, “Breaker Boy,” depicts a child whose job was to separate shards of slate that became mixed in with the coal. “These kids, many of them under ten years of age, worked under brutal conditions, with bleeding fingers and breathing in clouds of coal dust.” It was this type of abuse that sent Lewis Hines to photograph the mines in nearby Wilkes Barre, pictures that enabled legislation against child labor.
Being in a place where historical artifacts are easy to come by, Freda got the word out to the local flea marketeers and antiques dealers that he was looking for certain kinds of objects. “I’ve pretty much cornered the market on children’s slate tablets,” he said in a phone conversation yesterday.
One of the slates he collected became the support of a painting of the town’s clock tower (above, left), one of the 15 or so works in his upcoming solo exhibition at the Carbon County Cultural Project in Jim Thorpe. The opening this Saturday serves as a kick-off for a five-day storytelling workshop led by Marshall Arisman, Chair of the MFA Illustration program at the School of Visual Arts, with Anthony on board as well as illustrators John Mattos and Victor Stabin.
Freda will give a historical tour of the area next Monday, after which students will explore on their own to identify a subject that appeals to them. “We wanted to offer a workshop where everyone will leave with something concrete – at least one finished piece, along with a sketchbook full of ideas,” he said.
Carbon County - Jim Thorpe - Lake Harmony - Palmerton 