Situated below a view of New York City’s jagged skyline, a steel-and-cement power plant interior dominates Electric Power’s composition. Rivera peeled back his plant’s facade to bring the workers—deep in the inner workings of its machinery—into the space of the viewer, exposing the human labor that powers the modern city. The work captures Rivera’s excitement at witnessing industrialization in the United States firsthand. He retrospectively described his time in the U.S. in the early 1930s as a “crucial test,” saying that “unlike Mexico, [it] was a truly industrial country such as I had originally envisioned as the ideal place for modern mural art.”