Detroit Industry Murals – 1000 piece puzzle

In fact, at the onset of the Depression, Diego Rivera was commissioned by Edsel Ford to create the series of murals in the gallery at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Rivera’s Detroit Industry murals are one of the greatest treasures in the United States.
When Mexican artist Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit in 1932 to paint these walls, the city was a major industrial center. For this reason, it was one of the cities hardest hit by the Great Depression. Industrial production and the workforce were a third of what they had been before the Crash of 1929.

Rivera arrived in Detroit just days after a notorious hunger march in which thousands of unemployed workers marched from downtown Detroit to the gates of the Ford Motor Company River Rouge plant to demand work. Armed Ford security guards encountered them, panicked, and shot at the protesters, killing six people .
This confrontation became known as the Battle of the Overpass. Workers were barred from the Ford factories, but Rivera put them to work in the heart of the museum.

The space he was assigned to paint was aligned on an east/west/north/south axis. Rivera used this architectural orientation symbolically. Indeed, on the east wall , facing the rising sun, beginnings, and new life, he depicted a child cradled in the bulb of a plant, cradled by two plowshares and framed on either side by heavy nudes holding grain and fruit, symbolizing abundant harvests. These panels introduce some of the world’s first agricultural technologies.