A towering garment rack rose on a small patch of grass on King Street East last weekend, equally outsize swatches of fabric dangling from its long bar, left to twist gently in the wind. Cut to evoke portions of sewing patterns, their helpless motion, subject to the whim of a breeze, seems apt, and in more ways than one. The garment industry that once thrived here is now all but packed up and gone, though its long run in the lower reaches of the city’s old industrial era was hardly a buoyant one, with immigrant workers, mostly women, subject to their sweatshop schedules and criminally low pay. (Literally — it was among the industries in the early 20th century that prompted the government to act on a minimum wage.)

It can put you in the mind of a memorial, which it is, but it’s also a resurrection. Called Pins and Needles by the artist Karen Kraven, the piece conjures ghosts of bad old days where fair pay and labour codes were the stuff of fantasy. In her research, Kraven uncovered photographs from the Ontario Jewish Archives of the 1931 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union strike in Toronto, where 500 women walked off the job to protest deplorable conditions. Attacked by their male coworkers, and harassed and arrested by police, their protest was short-lived, and they returned to work having achieved none of their goals, and where retribution, no doubt, took place behind the factory’s closed doors.

Here, tucked between the brick walls of a pair of buildings, Pins and Needles is also the opening chapter of a comeback story for the Toronto Sculpture Garden, which hosted 80-some artists from 1981 to 2014, when the Odette family, who had committed to its support for that time, let its original agreement expire. Nuit Blanche made use of it in 2015, with a project by An Te Liu, but it’s been quiet ever since. At last, the city’s culture division found some space in its budget to revive its schedule of two installations per year; Kraven’s is the first.

The garden’s return gives Pins and Needles a sense of ceremony, perhaps, but the work is strongly focused on its own priorities. Pins and Needles — its title taken from a 1937 Broadway musical backed by the union aimed at building public awareness and support of the workers’ plight — seems a direct response to the futility of registering respect for generations of women who invested lives in invisible labour, putting shirts on the backs of countless people.

They worked hidden from view, their input unacknowledged for the necessity that it was. Kraven, almost as a corrective, puts on a monumental display, bathing it in spotlights, and accompanies it with a piano duet. It’s a tribute, though a grim one, to an under-appreciated cog of the economy that’s since fled to parts of the world where its exploitative ways can continue unchecked.

Pins and Needles performs some necessary work in exhuming labour history, but its role in continuing the lineage of the Sculpture Garden is significant too. Anyone who saw such things as Katie Bethune-Leamen’s Mushroom Studio in 2008, a towering toadstool fitted with a workspace in its base, often occupied by the artist, or Instant Coffee’s Disco Fallout Shelter, a yellow brick path leading to a sparkly bunker fitted with hot pink blast doors, a funky beat thrumming from within, would say it’s been missed. Kraven’s work, with its nod to histories both local and global, reminds us how potent an element of the urban fabric it was, and can again be.