Current Issues Series event, A.I.R. Gallery, 97 Wooster Street, c. 1982.
Sunday, October 18 at 3:00 PM
A.I.R. Gallery (155 Plymouth St)
Join NWL-NYC at A.I.R. Gallery for a consciousness-raising centered on care work — its visibility, value, challenges, and the structures that shape our experiences of care giving.
How visible or invisible has your caregiving been? Has it changed over time or in different circumstances?
Do you feel that the social structures in your life value care, or not? Why? How?
Describe a time you felt your care work was unsuccessful. What resources, if any, were available to you at the time?
By analyzing our experiences, we’ll investigate the larger social and structural conditions surrounding care work and the ways those conditions shape how care is given, received, recognized, and valued.
This consciousness-raising is held in collaboration with artist Kirsten Batten Leach and A.I.R. Gallery.
Funding has been made possible by The Puffin Foundation.
National Women's Liberation (NWL) is a multiracial feminist group for women who want to fight male supremacy and gain more freedom for women. Their priorities are abortion and birth control, overthrowing the double day, and feminist consciousness-raising.
Kirsten Batten-Leach, labor cocoon with spiracles: letting oxygen weather our work, 2026, Rust and verdigris-stained canvas scraps, dried flowers, ink, turmeric, wine, thread.
Kirsten Batten-Leach is an interdisciplinary artist who makes sculptures and performances about care-taking and bodily autonomy. She creates a record of these durational works in the form of painting and drawing. Her background as a former ballet dancer and domestic worker informs the physical rigor of her object-making practice.
She is currently a 2025-26 A.I.R. Gallery Fellow, a Puffin Foundation Artist Grant recipient, and a 5x5 Collective Grant recipient and was shortlisted for the Smack Mellon Residency Program. She has exhibited works at NYU Gallatin Galleries, The Factory, My Pet Ram and Black Brick Project. Raised in Boston, MA she completed her MFA at Pratt Institute and earned a BFA in English Literature from Mount Holyoke College.