Fratelli Alinari, Portrait of Wet Nurse with Baby, 1900, photo Alinari/Art Resource, NY.
Thursday, March 12 at 6 PM
A.I.R. Gallery
Please join us on Thursday, March 12 at 6PM to celebrate the release of Barbara Zucker's book, The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled published by Abbeville Press (Hardcover, Feb 24th). Zucker, artist, author and co-founder of A.I.R. Gallery will organize a participatory conversation around artmaking, book publishing and the fascinating and underknown profession of the wet nurse. Attendees who may have stories about a wet nurse from their own family histories or communities are encouraged to bring those with them to share at the event.
Milk and cookies will be served
Presented in collaboration with Accola Griefen Fine Art and Abbeville Press.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled is both a social history and a feminist act of reparation, uncovering the forgotten—perhaps deliberately buried—occupation of wet nursing. The wet nurse—a woman hired to breastfeed a child not her own—is an age-old occupation; in fact, archaeologists have discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen’s wet nurse. In modern Europe and the United States, wet nursing persisted into the early twentieth century, when bottles and formula rendered it virtually obsolete. This labor was inherently layered with issues of misogyny, race, and class, as mothers who had recently given birth ceased nourishing their own baby to provide for their entire family. Spanning social strata, wealthy families hired wet nurses to spare mothers the necessity of nursing, while foundling babies were fed by wet nurses employed by orphanages. Zucker’s lively text is abundantly illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs she has collected over years of research, as well as her own arresting drawings and sculptures inspired by the topic. The Second Oldest Profession will be essential and provocative reading for anyone interested in women’s history.
Barbara Zucker (b. 1940) is an artist, writer and professor working in sculpture, drawing and installation. Playing with post-minimalism, her earliest “chair sculptures” of the 1960’s challenged the dominate art dictates of the time, as did later works from the 1970’s and 1980’s that are most closely associated with the Pattern and Decoration Movement. Her elegant and often minimal forms frequently utilize industrial materials and employ visual humor to reference the politics around women’s bodies.
Zucker’s work has been exhibited in museums across the US and is included in numerous collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Broad Art Museum, among others. Her work has been covered in publications such as The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and Ms. Magazine to name a few. Zucker has also written for Art News, Hyperallergic, The Village Voice, The Art Journal, M/E/A/N/I/N/G and Heresies. In 1972 Zucker was one of the first two founders of A.I.R. Gallery.
Zucker has a solo exhibition of works on paper and sculpture related to the theme of the wet nurse now on view at Duane Thomas Gallery from February 12 through March 14th 137 West Broadway. Gallery hours Thursday-Saturday, 11-5 pm.