Invisible Makers
Judy Chicago’s team for The Dinner Party
For the Kerry James Marshall exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago I was commissioned by Ann Meisinger and Rosie May to do a reinterpretation of Gardner’s Art Through The Ages. The books will be on display during the exhibition in the education lobby.
The project statement: “Collaborator, apprentice, assistant, fabricator, installer—these are some of the many terms referring to invisible labors which make art and architecture possible. Historically, the work of mosaic workers, fresco painters, minaturists, quilters, printers and sculptors—just to name a few—is often, if not always, unrecorded. Gardner’s Art Through the Ages has a predictably complicated relationship to such hidden labors. For instance, though her work on Rodin’s sculptures is the stuff of legend, Camille Claudel is not mentioned in the brief section on his work. Japanese woodblock printers, though acknowledged as essential and highly skilled labor, are unnamed. In the two-page spread on feminism, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party has no mention of the legions of women crafters who made the work possible, and the collaboration’s critical contribution to a discussion on feminist art practice.This project is an exploration of invisible art labor through the Marxist feminist perspective. This perspective considers these unacknowledged or unpaid labors in relationship to power, capital, accumulation and privatization. This research will be presented in a series of pink bookmark tip ins throughout the book as marginalia challenging our notions of authorship and artistic masterpiece. The wrap cover with the title is made from handmade paper I made with Miriam Schaer.”
Camille Claudel
Josephena De Obidos
Hildegard Von Bingen
Nicholas Hilliard
Vanessa Bell