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Altered Landscapes; Shattered Dreams

This exhibit presents  colorful landscapes of the Côte D'Azure, France's Blue Coast of ease and luxury set above stark portraits of Fayette County, Pennsylvania, once the heart of the world's coal-and-coke industry-the 19th century's steel capital, today a hulking shell of American achievement and American tragedy. The exhibition was originally made possible by the generosity of Citibank, N. Y.

Provence, France: Destination of Royalty, Artists and the cogniscienti

In the portraits of the South of France, Brett Wexler has focused his camera on the polished, optimistic changes made to the environment over the past millennium by the communes of the region. Even the access path to l’Escalet beach , which seems to accidentally meander over the hilltop, was carefully placed to visually stun bathers as they approached. Wexler shows us, not only the artistic decisions made by the people who designed each of the homes, libraries and streets but also the life-affirming excitement which they conveyed and which attracted regular visitors such as Queen Victoria, Jacqueline Kennedy Onasis, and artists Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh.

Appalachian Coal and Coke regions trade American forests for wealth

On the other hand, the wealth of Western Pennsylvania lay beneath the forest's floor, a great American forest with rivers and mountains which seemed, in the 19th century, in infinite supply. So the same reverence did not apply. There were no tourists to Western Pennsylvania’s coal mines, only Eastern Europeans and African Americans hoping to earn an honest day's pay. These are pictures of the county that made the family Frick, that paid for its art and mansions, that paid for its philanthropy. It's a region like so many others whose underground fuel forged the great, baronial industrial families of America, the Carnegies and the Rockefellers. Here, Wexler shows us an American landscape first altered by the dream of Industrial Empire and then altered by the forces of time and deterioration. We see the effects of outsourcing 50 years later: homes aging atop abandoned coal mines, rusting coal cars and overturned mine entrances, a land still bearing the sooty scars of coke ash and smoke. But Wexler also shows us (Christmas Porch Lights) that if we look closely, we will see the remnants of perseverance and hope.

American Coal, Coke, and Steel give way to pointless outsourcing

Great wealth and beautiful community come with a price. Fayette Co, PA was once the heart of Coke Country (coal processed to burn hotter and thus smelt steel more efficiently), the energy for American steel production by USSteel. Many of the coal mines were owned by HC Frick whose philanthropy founded the Frick Art Museum in NY. After the Korean War, American steel was outsourced, supplanted by cheaper Asian steel. The humans and the coke ash were left behind. Worse, as Pennsylvania attempted to reeducate workers for service industry jobs, those jobs were again outsourced, this time to the Indian subcontinent.
Brett is immensely grateful for the effort of Pamela Seighman, Curator of the Coal and Coke Heritage Museum at Penn State University and her husband Tom whose guidance made these pictures possible. The University museum now houses part of this collection.

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