The Body is a Drum, the Voice a Song, the Soul a Fire

Labor is more than work; it is an act of care. It binds people not just through toil, but through collective action. On the factory floor, at the loom, along the picket line—these are spaces where effort meets empathy, where shared struggle becomes a living record, a force, a song.

This exhibition brings together the work of Tabitha Arnold, Dianna Settles, and Lewis Hine— artists who turn their gaze toward the unseen currents of labor: its intimacy and its struggles. Arnold’s tapestries weave together a history of labor movements in the Southeast, Settles’ paintings reveal the collective heartbeat of organizing work, and Hine’s photographs capture the daily realities and inequities of industrial labor in early 20th-century East Tennessee. The exhibition draws from the audio archives of the Highlander Center, a wellspring of resistance that has preserved the music and voices of labor organizers, civil rights leaders, and the people who built this country with their hands. These images and sounds, both past and present, are not just records of labor, but testaments to the histories that have shaped who we are today.

IMAGE: Dianna Settles, Hundredth Repetition, After High Noon, 2025, acrylic and colored pencil on panel, 24 x 32 inches