A discussion with artists about how their creative practices have been shaped by their labor as caregivers or service workers.

Waiting tables, babysitting, gardening, parenting, dishwashing, nursing, elder care, home care, cooking, answering questions and complaints, giving rides, tending to customers: paid and unpaid, at home and at work, many artists spend as much time or more attending to the needs of others as they do attending to their own artistic practices. For this public discussion, artists represented in Day Jobs discuss the relationship between care and service and how their creative practices have been shaped by their labor as caregivers or service workers.

What are the differences and similarities between service and care? In each of these artist’s practice as in the exhibition Day Jobs as a whole, the work that is in excess of the studio work has become a source of inspiration for making art. This panel will highlight these points of inspiration. It will also look at the ways in which the artists who perform this labor balance the demands of this work with the need to care for themselves, and, in turn, their creative practices.

About the Artists
As a Venezuelan who arrived in New York without family, a stable income, or reliable housing, Violette Bule captures the weight of her own lived experiences and the collective challenges faced by immigrant laborers in this country, emphasizing the importance of immigrants who work in the service industry.

Lenka Clayton has reframed her domestic life as a residency, creating a set of conditions that enabled her labor as a mother to support her work as an artist. Fragmented attention, anxiety, and the limited mobility of parenthood became productive pathways to new methods of working, rather than obstacles to overcome.

Jay Lynn Gomez’s art is rooted in her personal, lived experiences. She was born to undocumented Mexican immigrants in the Inland Empire east of Los Angeles. Beginning in 2009, after attending graduate school, Gomez got a job as a live-in nanny to a Beverly Hills family and began to paint figures of unseen workers onto pages torn from luxury magazine spreads discarded by her employer.

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All public programs at the Cantor Arts Center are always free! Space for this program is limited; advance registration is recommended. Those who have registered will have priority for seating.

Parking
Paid visitor parking is available along Lomita Drive as well as oon the first floor of the Roth Way Garage Structure, located at the corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way at 345 Campus Drive, Stanford , CA 94305. From the Palo Alto Caltrain station, the Cantor Arts Center is about a 20-miute walk or there the free Marguerite shuttle will bring you to campus via the Y or X lines. 

Disability parking is located along Lomita Drive near the main entrance of the Cantor Arts Center. Additional disability parking is located on Museum Way and in Parking Structure 1(Roth Way & Campus Drive). Please click here to view the disaility parking and access points.

Accessibility Information or Requests
Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University is committed to ensuring our programs are accessible to everyone. The main entrance of the Cantor Arts Center (Lomita Drive) is not accessible. the accessible entrance is down a pathway just to the left of the main entrance stairs. Just inside the accessible entrance, equipped with a power-operated door, an enclosed wheelchair lift provides access to the 1st floor main lobby.  To request access information and/or accommodations for this event, please complete this form at least one week prior to the event: museum.stanford.edu/access.

For questions, please contact disability.access@stanford.edu or Kwang-Mi Ro, kwangmi8@stanford.edu, (650) 723-3469.

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Image: Violette Bule, Homage to Johnny, 2015. Installation view, Blanton Museum of Art, Day Jobs, 2023. Steel grate, forks, and magnets, approx. 48 ½ × 65 × 15 in. (123.2 × 165.1 × 38.1 cm). Collection of the artist. Photo by Manny Alcalá