BMA: Take a ‘walking tour’ of 1930s Birmingham with artist Richard Coe

Artist and Selma native Richard Coe moved to Birmingham in 1934, bought a press and begin making a large body of etchings portraying life in the Magic City, an industrial boomtown hit hard by the Depression.

The Birmingham Museum of Art is showing a large group of these images for the first time in its exhibit, “Magic City Realism: Richard Coe’s Birmingham,” March 24-June 17.

There are 62 pieces on display, mostly etchings but also three oil paintings, according to Kate Crawford, BMA American art curator.

Trained as a painter, Coe made his etchings in Birmingham while working for two federal arts programs.

“The etchings really show his talent as an artist because he's new to the art form,” Crawford said.

There are technical glitches in some of the prints, but Coe’s abilities in the medium were “growing with leaps and bounds with each print,” Crawford said.

“Everything he does is smart and creates a beautiful image,” she said.

Coe portrays downtown, Sloss Furnaces, churches, schools, hospitals and other centers of civic life.

But the prints also offer a gritty view of daily life in the neighborhoods, including poor ones -- women laundering clothes, children playing on stilts.

“This is an unusual subject for artists in the 1930s,” Crawford said. “They aren’t focused on scenes from daily life.”

“It’s like (Coe) is taking you on a walking tour of the city,” she said.

Crawford said that it “is still a sort of mystery” to her why Coe -- a very skilled painter -- bought his own press and started making so many prints after his move to the Magic City.

“Artists work across mediums all the time, but it is really interesting that he would pick up in such a intensive way in a new medium,” she said.

One motivation may have been economic, according to Crawford.

“The body of etchings is so large that it seems to have been done with a federal commission in mind,” she said.

But she sees another, deeper motivation for this impressive body of work.

“I think the city just inspires him,” she said. “I think he wanted to make some money, but he also fell in love with the city.”

The exhibition is part of the ongoing statewide celebration of Alabama’s bicentennial, ALABAMA 200.

For details, go to artsbma.org.