Ralph Fasanella was born in the Greenwich Village section of New York City in 1914, the third of six children. His home was full of the sights, sounds and smells of an immigrant Italian household. The Fasanella family had its Italian foods, language and customs in a city virtually reinventing itself daily with the influx of people from a great number of countries and cultures and with the rapid changes in industry and business during the First World War and prior to the Great Depression onset in 1929.

Ralph's time as a youth was split between riding on his father's ice wagon and two separate stints in Catholic reform schools. For Ralph, his father represented all working men, beaten down day after day, and struggling for survival. The trips to reform school for truancy and running away from home reinforced Ralph Fasanella's dislike for authoritarianism and the breaking of people's spirits.

Ralph also gained a great deal of his education when he accompanied his mother to the dress shop where she toiled as a buttonhole maker. He learned much from his mother, including politics and organizing, through her work in progressive anti-fascist political movements in the Italian-American community. Her influence became even stronger when Joseph Fasanella left the family and returned to his native Italy in the 1920s.

Due to his mother's influence and to his own growing experience with injustice and inequity in the United States, Ralph devoted himself to the reemerging trade union movement of the 1930s and '40s. He successfully organized a number of unions, worksites and occupational groups including fire fighters, elevator operators and hospital workers. He had his longest and most successful experience with a single union when he was a member and organizer of the United Electrical Workers (UE). Among his organizing victories, Ralph helped the UE at General Electric, Sperry Gyroscope and American Telephone and Telegraph.

During the late 1930s, Ralph Fasanella fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an American volunteer force which fought on the side of the Spanish Republic against the successful fascist rebellion led by General Francisco Franco. Fasanella survived the Spanish Civil War to return to his work, back in America, organizing workers into unions.

In the mid-1940s, Fasanella's complaints of intense finger pain led a union co-worker to suggest art courses as therapy, which Ralph attended through an area labor college. Ralph Fasanella became consumed by art and his own personal need to paint and to paint the things he knew best around him. Ultimately, he left his organizing work to paint full-time. Working full-time as an artist could not pay the bills so Fasanella pumped gas and painted nights and weekends when he wasn't working at the service station.

In 1950, he married Eva Lazorek, a school teacher, and together they raised a son, Marc, and a daughter, Gina.

Fasanella painted in obscurity until New York magazine featured him on the cover of their October 30, 1972 issue. The magazine proclaimed him "the best primitive painter since Grandma Moses." Since that time, Fasanella's paintings have been featured in a number of one-man shows and within larger exhibits of folk, urban and working-class art. His work has brought new respect for labor and working-class themes within arts as well as encouraging whole generations of workers, from all types of workplaces across the nation and world, to express themselves and explore their own workplaces, unions and working lives through painting, sculpture, poetry, fiction, theater and dance.

In 1986, an effort was initiated to place as many of Ralph Fasanella's paintings as possible in public spaces where students, working people and others interested in Fasanella's visions of American working-class life could permanently view them.

Ralph who once stated, "I didn't paint my paintings to hang in some rich guy's living room," supported this effort.

Fasanella paintings can be found in the following museums and public spaces:

• Lewiston/Auburn College, University of Southern Maine, Lewiston, ME
• Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA
• Heritage State Park Visitors' Center, Lawrence, MA
• O'Leary Library, University of Lowell, Lowell, MA
• New Bedford City Hall, New Bedford, MA
• State Administration Building, Providence, RI
• New York State Historical Association, Fenimore House Museum, Cooperstown, NY
• Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY
• Ellis Island Immigration Museum, Ellis Island, NY
• Museum of American Folk Art, New York City
• 53rd and 5th Avenue Subway Station, New York City
• Communication Workers of America Headquarters Building, Washington, DC
• Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC
• United States Capital Building, Washington, DC
• Museum of American Art, Washington, DC
• Flint Public Library, Flint, MI
• Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
• Milwaukee Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI
• Oakland Airport Terminal Building, Oakland, CA
  
  

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