in the Porter College Faculty Gallery:
Working for Dignity: The Art, Meanings, and Voices of Low-wage Labor 2016
“Work is about a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.” Studs Terkel
Work has long been a key source of human dignity, a central way we realize self-worth and respect. But California’s “new economy” has seen an explosion of low-wage jobs, which all too often leave workers struggling in poverty, exhausted or hurt, harassed and demeaned, and with few ways out or up. The shift toward more low-wage and precarious work prompts us to ask: is there still dignity in work? This exhibit explores this question through a variety of lenses and honors those whose work often goes unseen.
The work in this exhibit is connected to the UCSC Center for Labor Studies’ Santa Cruz Low-Wage Worker Study and its accompanying website, Working for Dignity. The study surveyed over 1,300 low-wage workers throughout Santa Cruz County, establishing baseline data on workers, industries, working conditions, and labor violations in the low-wage sectors of Santa Cruz County. Yet we also wanted to go beyond just a statistical portrait of low-wage work: often lost in discussions of the economy are people’s own understandings of work, particularly the voices of low-wage workers themselves. As artists and researchers, we are particularly mindful that the meanings of work cannot be divorced from those who perform it.
Taking inspiration from a variety of social documentary traditions, from Sebastião Salgado’s photographs to NPR’s audio diary StoryCorps, the exhibit features low-wage workers and explores worksites across Santa Cruz County. In order to truly pay tribute to the work that these individuals do, the art had to replicate the theme and concept. Thus we employ a range of methods and media - in-depth interviews, photography, lithography, digital story-telling, video, auto-photography, wheat-paste public art, and sculpture - to explore, represent and reflect on working people in our community and the meanings of low-wage work. A central group of the photographs were hand printed through a time and laboring inducing process known as photo-lithography. The fact that the hands of a worker and the hands of the artists are used to create allowed for a connection to occur between the visual imagery and the subject. Long days of work, hardships, and obstacles were all a part of the image making of this project. It was important for the artists involved to try to replicate the labor they were capturing by creating images that required a great amount of work.
Artists include:
Natalie Alas (Porter College, junior, Economics and Sociology)
Christine Petersen (UCSC graduate in Sociology 2015)
Edward Ramirez (UCSC graduate in Fine Art and Sociology 2015)
Steve McKay (Associate Professor of Sociology and Director, UCSC Center for Labor Studies)
website for Working for Dignity