Art History from Home:
Art, Work, and Labor

Online, via Zoom

This series of online talks by the Whitney’s Joan Tisch Teaching Fellows highlights works in the Museum’s collection to illuminate critical topics in American art from 1900 to the present. During each thirty-minute session, participants are invited to comment and ask questions through a moderated chat.

Since industrialization, American artists have grappled with how to depict, honor, or critique the different ways we work, from the manual labor of the assembly line to the administrative labor of the office. Join Teaching Fellow Joseph Henry to explore how select artists from the Whitney collection—including Thomas Hart Benton, Elizabeth Catlett, Robert Morris, and Mierle Laderman Ukeles—have engaged with the artistic process and the changing nature of work throughout the twentieth century. What lessons could these histories have for our present concerns with burnout and the so-called “Great Resignation?" 

Joseph Henry is a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney and a Ph.D. candidate in the art history program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where his research focuses on Expressionism and the relationship between art and labor in addition to design, dance and performance, and queer visual culture. He has held several prestigious fellowships and has written on contemporary art for publications such as Artforum, Frieze, and Art in America, as well as in several exhibition catalogues.