“Bread and Roses: Artists and the Class Divide”

“Bread and Roses: Artists and the Class Divide” presents a spectrum of projects and practices that confront the economic paradoxes of the art world. In some works, the artists acknowledge their simultaneous membership in dominant and oppressed classes, as in the wall-hung printouts of Andrea Fraser’s essay “L’1% C’est Moi,” which focuses on art-market biases and income inequality, and in Cindy Sherman’s large-format photographs Untitled #471, 472, and 473, all 2008, in which the artist appears as three different stereotypes of a wealthy matron. Gerard Kwiatkowski’s Untitled, 1964, indicts the ruling class while underscoring its instability: A crumbling gilt frame confines a canvas made from scraps of worn-out workers’ uniforms. Kwiatkowski’s formulation suggests that both the positions of the dominant and oppressed are impoverished.

Other works such as Zbigniew Libera’s Free Lancer (Self-Portrait), 2013, place the artist squarely in the camp of the persecuted. Two large-format photographs shot from the interior of a car show the artist—naked, wet, and dirty—being escorted by security guards through a field next to a housing estate. The composition evokes Francisco Ribalta’s Dead Christ Supported by Angels, ca. 1615, in a strong symbolic gesture that is highly legible in Catholic Poland. Libera’s title points to dispossession and economic precarity; in the context of the images, it aligns the unaffiliated worker with a self-sacrificing divinity.

In a more didactic approach, Michael Oswell and Jan Sowa’s fluorescent yellow four-paneled silk screen Infographics, 2016, provides graphs and quotes regarding labor, debt, inequality, and the connection of art to capitalism and wealth. The work’s prominent placement in the museum’s front window reminds us that the economies of contemporary art operate within larger systems of privilege and disadvantage. Just on the other side of the glass, the world continues.