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Zoë Charlton: The Domestic, Shannon Egan

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Zoë Charlton’s grandmother, Everlena Bates, was a domestic worker in Northern Florida. Charlton pays homage not only to her grandmother in her recent body of work, but also to the long history of African-American women’s labor in white families’ homes throughout the South. Although her grandmother did not speak often or directly about the conditions of her employment, Charlton nonetheless is keenly aware of the injustices, possible abuses, and intimate labor endured by black maids, housekeepers, and nannies who worked endlessly long hours and with little pay through the twentieth century. The collages and large-scale installation in Charlton’s exhibition The …