An important revival in art education seeks to provide adolescents with art projects that are culturally and politically relevant to their lives. Stimulated in part by both a postmodernist attitude and the attention to visual culture, such projects address content that is meaningful to students' families, their futures, and their society. These projects do not shy away from political implications; rather, they embrace them. Working, job preparation, unemployment, and the labor market constitute one set of socially relevant subjects for art of the past and present. A confluence of cultural, economic, and political factors in the 1930s and 1940s propelled the neglected image of the worker to the forefront of public awareness through American painting. The laborer has not often been a popular image in the history of art. Historically, art was dominated by images of religion, royalty, grand historical events, or more recently, by quiet moments of everyday life. However, while many artists during the 1930s were abandoning those subjects and embracing modernism through abstract imagery, others were tackling the gritty contemporary images of work, poverty, and political strife. In this article, the author examines the work of three artists of the 1930s (Jacob Lawrence, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn), who worked into the 1940s creating powerful images of work at a time when employment was hard to find.