By Glen Warchol

| The Salt Lake Tribune

The "At Work: Prints from the Great Depression" exhibit at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts includes images of powerfully muscled workers who swing mauls, attack oil rigs and wrestle hard-rock drills deep underground. The exhibit might cause one to wonder what a similar set of prints of 21st-century laborers would look like.

Maybe a woodcut of a digital geek and his computer, surrounded by shredded Dorito bags and heroically crushed Mountain Dew cans? Or, perhaps, an epic etching of headset-crowned operators at a call center for contact lenses?

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At a glance

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Work it

The exhibit “At Work” will hang through May 6.

Where » Utah Museum of Fine Arts, 410 Campus Center Drive, Salt Lake City

Hours » Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Wednesday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. (Closed Mondays and holidays)

Admission » $7, $5 seniors/youth; free for children under 6, U. students and staff, and UMFA members

Info » 801-581-7332 www.umfa.utah.edu

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Somehow, something important in the American work psyche slipped away with the onset of the information age. "We just don’t have images like this anymore," says Matt Basso, director of the University of Utah’s Center for the American West, who, with history graduate student Emily Johnson, organized the show of 1930s Works Progress Administration prints. "Workers were heroes."

Basso hopes the exhibit will force viewers to confront questions about work and its meaning — now and two generations ago. "Work is a monumental part of our lives," he says. "These prints resonate. People who view them are going to think about work in their lives."

The exhibition includes 60 woodcuts, serigraphs (silk screens), lithographs and etchings, some by American masters, including Thomas Hart Benson, Grant Wood and Cody, Wyo., native Jackson Pollock (though his print of farm workers wouldn’t be considered among his best work). The prints come from the private collection of Marcia and John Price.

The WPA emphasized printmaking because prints could be cheaply mass produced. "They wanted to see this art on every worker’s wall," Basso says.

As can be expected in the 1930s, the work of women is underrepresented, and what’s depicted is mostly domestic jobs, such as sewing. People of color are represented, including one print that illustrates a group of black gandy dancers laying railroad track.

The "At Work" exhibit is a centerpiece for a larger, multilayered project that involves the belated publication by Red Butte Press of a lost WPA literary collection, Men at Work; a Labor Day symposium; several educational forums; and a hand-made book by contemporary writers, Wo/Men at Work, which examines women and men’s work in the Great Depression and in this century’s so-called Great Recession.

Basso has one trepidation: Are the prints compelling enough to attract a large audience in the 21st century? "If we call a show ‘At Work,’ " Basso says, half joking, "will they come?"

gwarchol@sltrib.com; facebook.com/nowsaltlake