100 Years of Working from Home
June 10–December 17, 2023
A new exhibition exploring the blurred boundaries between labor and leisure has opened at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (MSU Broad Art Museum). The exhibition, Shouldn’t You Be Working? 100 Years of Working from Home, begins with images that document the MSU School of Home Economics’ teachings in house management and contrasts those archival images with more contemporary works of various interpretations of “working from home.”
The exhibition considers the domestic sphere as an ever-changing site of labor. Computers, the Internet, and mobile phones have enabled a variety of new labor practices, an unprecedented amount of which are situated within the home: White-collar home offices, self-employed social media influencers, the hidden labor of coders and offshore renderers now coexist with traditional domestic work by nannies, caretakers, and homemakers.
“Michigan State University was a pioneering institution of higher learning, which, in the late 19th century, began to look at homemaking—working from and in the home—as a serious profession,” says MSU Broad Art Museum Associate Curator Teresa Fankhänel. “This legacy endures today in the university’s curriculum and in the physical layout of the campus. Who works in the home and the type of work that is performed, however, has changed tremendously, not least due to technological advances in computation and the internet. The show explores what it means to work from home, past and present—between new-found freedom and total surveillance, and between traditional domestic labor and the high-tech gig economy. The works on display challenge us to ask a fundamental and personal question: How do we want to live and work?”
Shouldn’t You Be Working? includes images from the MSU Broad Art Museum’s extensive photographic collection on traditional domestic labor—including photos by Walker Evans, Ewing Galloway Inc., Jim Goldberg, Laton Alton Huffman, Arthur Rothstein, John Edward Saché, and Marion Post Wolcott—as well as current digital and photographic work by contemporary artists and architects Chris Collins, Jay Lynn Gomez, Faith Holland, Won Kim, Keiichi Matsuda, Marisa Olson, Theo Triantafyllidis, Jon Rafman, Angela Washko and Guanyu Xu.
In tandem with the exhibition, the MSU Broad Art Museum has acquired works by Guanyu Xu (b. 1993, Beijing) and Jay Lynn Gomez (b. 1986, San Bernardino, California), who explore the concept of working at home via immigration experiences. Shouldn’t You Be Working? also debuts a new work by artist Marisa Olsen, Cream Screen, which looks at the way that homes have become private movie studios.
Shouldn’t You Be Working? 100 Years of Working from Home (on view June 10–December 17, 2023) is organized by the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and curated by Associate Curator Teresa Fankhänel with Curatorial Assistant Dalina A. Perdomo Álvarez and Curatorial Research and Administrative Assistant Thaís Wenstrom. Lead funding for this exhibition is provided by the Alan and Rebecca Ross Endowed Exhibition Fund.
The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University (MSU Broad Art Museum) connects people with art through experiences that inspire curiosity and inquiry. Presenting exhibitions and programs that engage diverse communities around issues of local relevance and global significance, the MSU Broad Art Museum advances the university values of quality, inclusion, and connectivity. Opened on November 10, 2012, the museum was designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid and named in honor of Eli and Edythe Broad, longtime supporters of the university who provided the lead gift for its creation.
Michigan State University has been working to advance the common good in uncommon ways for more than 150 years. One of the top research universities in the world, MSU focuses its vast resources on creating solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges, while providing life-changing opportunities to a diverse and inclusive academic community through more than 200 programs of study in 17 degree-granting colleges.
