William Gropper didn’t have the happiest of upbringings. He was born in 1897, in New York City, to Jewish immigrants from Ukraine and Romania; the family lived in a crowded tenement building on the Lower East Side. It didn’t make a difference that his father was college educated and spoke eight languages—he never rose out of the city’s garment industry. And Gropper’s aunt, she died in the tragic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911. These events led the young man to the New York School of Fine and Applied Arts, where he enrolled in 1915 and was soon creating political cartoons. Gropper started at the New York Tribune, then went on to the Revolutionary Age and the Liberator. He was leftist and radical, though he never joined the Communist Party, and produced socially conscious murals, prints, and paintings. Gropper died in 1977, age 79. In the first Gropper exhibition presented in Washington, D.C., 30 works celebrate the artist’s biting statements about labor, freedom, and democracy. —Elena Clavarino