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How do you turn economic geography into art? The Mexican painter, writer, and long-time communist Diego Rivera did it between 1932 and 1933 in painting the 25 panels of the mural “Detroit: Man and Machine” at the Detroit Institute of Arts (see cover). The panels tell a rich and complex economic geographical story: extracting resources from the ground, bringing together “hands” of workers from across the world, using various kinds of machinery - furnaces, stamping machines, drills, hoists, conveyor belts - in conjunction with the brawn of labor to manufacture and assemble, and finally produce, the finished product, in this case a car. The mural was paid for by Edsel Ford, son of Henry, and modeled on perhaps the most famous factory of the twentieth century - the Rouge complex, the Ford automobile manufacturing plant located at Dearborn, Michigan, just outside Detroit. The complex was first used to produce automobiles from 1913. Twenty years later, by the time Rivera came to paint it, it was already a symbol of the modern machine age, and more generally of the energy and might of industrial capitalism. Operations at the Rouge complex were vertically integrated, that is, all the different component processes of manufacture were contained within a single site, and as a result the workforce requirements were immense. At one point 75,000 employees worked there. The “B” building alone ... log in or subscribe to read full text