Exhibition inaugurates new Wolfsonian Teaching Gallery at Frost Art Museum

“Women’s Work/Men’s Work: Labor and Gender in America” draws upon The Wolfsonian-FIU’s collection. This new collaboration between the Frost Art Museum and The Wolfsonian-FIU will make the latter’s acquisitions more accessible to students attending classes at MMC.

By Julieth Dabdoub

The Wolfsonian-FIU presents “Women’s Work/Men’s Work: Labor and Gender in America,” an exhibition that explores how the sexual division of labor in America has been represented in art, propaganda and advertising. The exhibition, which is free and open to the public, is on view in The Wolfsonian Teaching Gallery at The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum from Jan. 20-April 25.

Until recently, notions of the kinds of work that are appropriate for men and for women have been quite distinct. Rooted in field, factory and mine, “male” labor has often been understood as embodying strength and skill, while “women’s work” has been associated with domesticity, reproduction and caretaking.

Focusing on the United States in the first half of the 20th century, the exhibition invites students and other gallery visitors to consider how the different work experiences of men and women have been portrayed by artists and designers in a variety of media. The more than two dozen objects on display include paintings, posters, prints and photographs, as well as ephemeral items such as advertising cards. They reveal how visual representations marked particular forms of labor – and attributes of laborers – as either male or female, but also how these once-firm categories began to erode under pressure from industrial expansion, new consumption and family patterns and, above all, the needs of a wartime economy.

These works give evidence of the tensions that arose when deeply-set notions of proper gender roles collided with the changing realities of labor in America.

Poster, Teamwork Builds Ships, c. 1918. Designed by William Dodge Stevens (American, 1870–1942). Published by Emergency Fleet Corporation. Printed by Forbes Boston Philadelphia Commercial, color lithograph. The Wolfsonian–FIU, Miami Beach, Florida, The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection, XX1992.180

This exhibition inaugurates the Frost Art Museum’s collaboration with The Wolfsonian-FIU in creating an at-Modesto A. Maidique Campus teaching gallery, in which The Wolfsonian’s collection can be presented at a site that is near the geographic center of FIU’s academic community.

Supported with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Wolfsonian Teaching Gallery is intended to provide an opportunity for FIU faculty members to work with Wolfsonian staff in developing small exhibitions, drawing on objects from the museum’s collection, that can serve as resources for teaching and learning.

“We are proud to begin this important collaboration with The Wolfsonian and see it as an opportunity to fulfill our educational mission,” said Carol Damian, director of the Frost. Added Cathy Leff, The Wolfsonian’s director, “It has always been our goal and that of the Frost Art Museum to engage faculty and students with our university’s museums. The Mellon Foundation grant has provided resources that we can use to accomplish this goal, and the teaching gallery is a wonderful step in that direction.”

For “Women’s Work/Men’s Work,” the museum has collaborated with history professor Alex Lichtenstein, who is teaching a course on 20th century U.S. labor history this semester. “This is a great opportunity to bring the rich resources of The Wolfsonian to students on campus,” said Lichtenstein. “For me, as a labor historian, it’s been eye-opening to research the collection and discover the incredible material the museum has about work and workers in the United States.”

The exhibition is co-curated by Jonathan Mogul, the Mellon coordinator of academic programs at The Wolfsonian-FIU.