A diary entry on immigrant women, unseen work, and what a museum can teach a portrait painter about who gets remembered
Monday, An Exhibition That Sat With Me Longer Than Expected
Visited the Springville Museum’s exhibition honouring the emotional, physical, and spiritual labour that has shaped Utah throughout its history this week, built around paintings, textiles, found objects and historical materials specifically celebrating the sacrifices of immigrant women, mothers, and caretakers whose contributions the wall text describes plainly as often underpaid, unseen, or undervalued, and I have not stopped thinking about it since.
As someone who makes a living painting commissioned portraits, almost always of babies whose own mothers commissioned the work, I found myself confronting an uncomfortable but genuinely useful question walking through this exhibition: whose labour actually makes each of my own commissioned portraits possible, and how much of that labour, the sleepless nights, the endless soothing required just to get one still moment for reference photos, ever actually appears anywhere in the finished, framed image.
Monday Afternoon, A Textile That Stopped Me Cold
One display featured a hand-stitched textile made by a mother across what the accompanying text described as years of stolen moments between other required work, a piece that took considerably longer to complete than any single painting I have ever produced, using considerably fewer resources and receiving, historically, considerably less recognition.
Tuesday, A Change I Am Considering For My Own Practice
I am seriously considering, for the first time, including a small acknowledgment with future commissioned portraits specifically naming the mother’s own labour alongside the child being painted, a gesture this exhibition has made feel newly necessary rather than simply sentimental.
An Exhibition Worth Letting Change How You Work
Whatever else this show accomplishes for other visitors, it has genuinely shifted something in how I think about my own commissioned work, and I suspect that shift will show up in my next several portraits whether I plan it deliberately or not.
I also mentioned this exhibition to my own mother afterward, herself an immigrant who raised four children while working two jobs, and her response, a long silence followed by a simple thank you for telling me about it, has stayed with me considerably longer than I expected a passing conversation to linger.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/