Photo by Bette McDevitt

By Bette McDevitt

During the Three Rivers Art Festival, I found my favorite at the Space Gallery; Marx@200, honoring the 200th birthday of Karl Marx. By the time you read this, the exhibit will have ended. I hope some readers had the opportunity to see it, and to experience the almost year long series of lectures that took place. The curators, had this to say about the exhibit.

“Some of the artists in the exhibit engage directly with Marx, while others confront capitalism and still others dream of revolution,” said the curators, CMU faculty Kathy M. Newman and Susanne Slavick.

Blake Fall-Conroy, from Baltimore and Ithaca, chose to confront capitalism head on, with humor.

He created  a device that looks like something from a long ago penny arcade, called the Minimum Wage Machine. It  gives you pennies and when you crank the handle for one hour, you will have $7.25, in pennies. The artist was inspired to create Minimum Wage Machine by his own tedious, low-paying job at a gas station. He remembers watching the time tick by, and figuring out how many pennies he earned with each passing minute. “It seems crazy,” he says, ‘That anyone’s time could be worth so little, and I wasn’t even at the minimum.”

Member of the Editorial Collective and of the Raging Grannies.