Pure Finder” is a goat hide-shaped rug I created for the prayer room at Glen Foerd, a gilded age estate in Philadelphia. It depicts workers engaged in the long and strenuous process of refining leather at the Vici Kid factory, which employed hundreds of Philadelphia workers from the late 1800s to early 1900s. The title of the piece comes from “pure,” which is a polite name for dog and pigeon feces. These were essential ingredients in removing hair from hide at the time. A “pure finder” historically made a living searching for feces and selling it to tanners to use in the leather factory.
The bloody underbelly of the piece curls forward from the wall, mimicking the contrast between the gilded Glen Foerd estate and the disgusting reality of the leather work that created it. Workers at the Vici Kid factory eventually went on strike to protest their awful work conditions. As any good labor organizer knows, creating the momentum and unity for a union means peeling back the facade of the workplace to discuss what really happens on the clock.
Peering into the largest hole in the piece, you can read an original poem typed by Glen Foerd’s former owner Florence Tonner. She writes about making a leather shoe, and though she surely never had to work a day in her life, she imagines this labor romantically and even a little wistfully.
While making these pieces, I did a lot of reflection on how I’ve internalized capitalist ideas of labor. I was raised in a conservative religious culture, and I’ve become very aware of the crossover in American attitudes toward work ethic and spiritual morality. I’m a Marxist now, but I’ve always been terrified of being “lazy.” If I follow the deepest thread of that fear, I imagine going to a fire-and-brimstone Hell.
Studying the wealthy owners of Glen Foerd, I could see how a devout Lutheran faith grounded their worldview. They owned huge collections of religious books and even had their own prayer room in the estate. Their capitalist class allowed them to live a life of luxury on the backs of factory workers who labored in miserable conditions. However, I think the owners of Glen Foerd slept well at night, because their religious piety made them feel morally good.
The poor, immigrant leather workers who created the wealth of Glen Foerd were religious too. The Polish-American population of Bridesburg attended Catholic church, where they listened to sermons in their first language under the glow of gorgeous stained-glass windows. They were humble and hard-working, despite the brutality of the job. At the end of a difficult week at the leather factory, they came to church for rest and replenishment.
Seeing how spirituality was so deeply entwined in both ends of the capitalist system at Glen Foerd, I made these rugs to explore my own questions and fears about Hell. Can you work so hard that you escape the fire and brimstone of God’s judgment? If you suffer for 40 hours a week so that another person can lounge in excess, doesn’t that make you a martyr? Who deserves to go down in history as a Saint? Who should we remember as a sinner?