Two scenes define Tyrus Wong’s remarkable 106-year-old life. In the first scene, a small boy in padded Chinese jacket gazes forlorn behind iron bars, torn from his father and detained indefinitely in a desolate U.S. immigration center off the California coast. In the second scene, the boy is a young man, an aspiring artist in sunny Los Angeles whom Walt Disney suddenly promotes to a key role in the making of beloved animated film Bambi. How did the boy become an artist, and what role did that trauma play in the beautiful imagery he later created for Hollywood? How do the two scenes connect to the seventy years after Bambi, when Tyrus worked as a studio sketch artist for Warner Bros., designed best-selling Christmas cards that sold in the millions, and spent a nearly half-century retirement flying his beautifully unique handmade kites on Santa Monica beach?
Background Artist: The Life and Work of Tyrus Wong is a kaleidescopic story about the immigrant origins of some of America’s best loved visual imagery. A chronicle of art and Asian American experience set against the backdrop of over a century of American history, Background Artist speaks to lovers of art, film, animation, and illustration history, and readers of biography, Asian American, and California studies.
Slavishak focuses on the workers whose bodies came to epitomize Pittsburgh, the men engaged in the arduous physical labor demanded by the city’s metals, glass, and coal industries. At the same time, he emphasizes how conceptions of Pittsburgh as quintessentially male limited representations of women in the industrial workplace. The threat of injury or violence loomed large for industrial workers at the turn of the twentieth century, and it recurs throughout Bodies of Work: in the marketing of artificial limbs, statistical assessments of the physical toll of industrial capitalism, clashes between labor and management, the introduction of workplace safety procedures, and the development of a statewide workmen’s compensation system.
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