BIRMINGHAM, AL.- In the wake of the Great Depression, Birmingham experienced a remarkable transformation that helped shape the city as we know it today. Artist Richard Coe, an Alabama native, documented the city’s rapidly changing urban fabric in his prints and paintings. Magic City Realism: Richard Coe’s Birmingham brings together over 60 of Coe’s images of the city for the first time.

Richard Coe arrived in Birmingham in 1934. While living in the city, he created a realistic accounting of the impact and achievement of the city’s iron and steel industry as it was suffering under the effects of the Great Depression. He produced hundreds of highly-detailed etchings depicting everyday life in and around the Magic City, from downtown’s impressive skyscrapers to the humble shanties housing Birmingham’s poor. Coe created these etchings while participating in two arts projects under President Roosevelt’s New Deal--first, the Public Works of Art Project from 1933 to 1934, and then the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in 1936. He was appointed head of Alabama’s state WPA art programs in 1937. Along with his illustrations of urban Birmingham, Coe’s work also includes landscapes, portraits, and figure studies.

“The 1930s were a fascinating period in Birmingham’s history. The city was in the throes of the Great Depression along with the rest of the country, and yet Birmingham was simultaneously an economic and artistic center in the Southeast,” says The William Cary Hulsey of American Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art, Katelyn D. Crawford. “Coe’s Birmingham etchings prominently feature the complex technology and human labor that allowed Birmingham to emerge like magic in the late nineteenth century and become the economic engine of the South in the early twentieth century. Sloss’s smoking, sparking blast furnaces were a point of pride for the region and were central to the city’s landscape. Coe’s work reminds viewers of the machines and people who continued working during this harsh time. Beyond the city’s furnaces, Coe represented churches, schools, and hospitals—all centers of civic life. In doing so, he constructed a composite image of the Magic City struggling through but nonetheless surviving the Great Depression.”

Born in 1904 in Selma, Alabama, Coe attended Castle Heights Military Academy in Lebanon, Tennessee, and went on to study architecture at the University of Cincinnati from 1924 to 1925. Shortly thereafter, he won a scholarship sponsored by ​The Birmingham News and the Allied Arts Club of Birmingham to study at the Grand Central School of Art in New York. After spending several years in Europe, Coe returned to Birmingham in 1934. He developed an interest in etching during his art training and had a studio with an etching press in the Five Points South neighborhood. Coe is best known locally for the mural he painted with artist Sidney Van Sheck in the auditorium of Woodlawn High School between 1935 and 1938, entitled Youth’s Strife in the Approach to Life’s Problems. Though he moved away from Alabama in 1939, Coe left behind a rich visual survey of Birmingham during the Great Depression.

“In celebrating industrial Birmingham, Coe joined fellow Alabama artists in creating a body of American scene images of the South,” says Crawford. “His images of women laundering clothes or children playing on stilts portray the rhythms of daily life—both good and bad. The artist’s prints provide a realistic and, at times, poignant view of the city’s life in the 1930s. ”

The works in ​Magic City Realism were drawn largely from the collection of John Peter Crook McCall and Doy Leale McCall, III. The McCall brothers have generously gifted the majority of the etchings in this exhibition to the Birmingham Museum of Art, significantly strengthening its holdings of Alabama art and establishing the leading institutional collection of Coe’s work.