People are working here. Not just the museum docents offering that the show is “all about unseen and unrecognized labor,” but also the people in the artworks. Labor of Love, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University (on through April 27), foregrounds invisible labor, meaning jobs kept behind closed doors, and those we’ve learned to ignore.

Immediately inside the entrance stands a landscaper: the life-size man is painted on a cardboard cutout, though the cutout balances on an actual ladder, draped with actual work gloves. The hedge he’s trimming hangs over a pink stucco wall and sports bubblegum flowers, and is painted on a large canvas. All that’s missing is the rumble of the hedge trimmer’s motor and the smell of combusting fuel. 

The piece, Against the Wall (2019), is a collaboration between Los Angeles–based artists Patrick Martinez and Jay Lynn Gomez, two of eight local and international artists featured. The show centers janitors, landscapers, and commercial farm workers, but also the uncredited intellectual output of women and incarcerated workers—jobs, vocations, and circumstances disproportionately held by marginalized groups, which often go unregulated because of their “invisible” status.    

Celebrating, or at least uncovering the “physical, emotional, and intellectual labor that is vital to [society’s] smooth and ongoing function” exposes systemic inequities, guest curator Alexandra Terry argues in the show’s statement. (Terry is the contemporary art curator at the New Mexico Museum of Art.) “Smooth” typically means smoothed over: spotless restrooms, tidy grocery aisles, and manicured yards are often contingent on undervalued labor.

Organizing a show around something as large and amorphous as “labor” risks making a rather vague overall statement, which is what happens here. Pieces using quotidian symbols (a sketchy ladder, a dirty flannel) to uncover specific instances of invisible labor made the biggest impact on me, situating invisible labor within my own life (i.e., the landscaper feeding a tree into a wood chipper outside my window as I write this). Instead of casting blame, they illuminate what one artist poignantly calls the “unintended consequences of ambitious lifestyle choices.” Weaker pieces foggily abstract “labor” by pointing fingers at governments, monolithic institutions, and the prison system—all oppressive, but difficult to engage when critiqued wholesale.

Another Martinez and Gomez collaboration, Labor of Love (2022), nails a ubiquitous example of invisible labor. In a setup similar to Against the Wall, swatches of violet stucco and subway and emerald tiles cover a 10-foot-wide canvas. A neon Open sign glows and a pair of LED ticker signs stream an infinitely repeating banner of roses. It’s all kind of awful, a mall or public building in microcosm that immediately gave me a dull headache. The wall text explains that a cleaning woman, another life-size cardboard figure, this time buffing tile with an actual rag, is Martinez’s late mother, Evelyn, a former janitor at the Los Angeles Federal Building. She’s “invisible,” yet impossible to ignore, rendered in such accurate perspective that I’d flinch whenever she caught my eye as I wandered around the gallery.

In a solo series, Gomez flaunts behind-the-scenes labor by making it a focal point of editorials. She developed the idea while nannying in houses that looked ripped from Architectural Digest, save the staff keeping them photo ready. In Last Look (2023), she revises a photo of an airy Better Homes & Gardens mudroom. The spread quotes the homeowner: “A room can still be beautiful even if it’s functional.” Agreeing, Gomez paints in the woman who gave the functional foyer its spotless shine, effectively translating the entire show’s conceit: featuring house cleaners in a luxury home photo shoot is preposterous. But should it be?

There’s also a participatory element. In the exhibit, a sign prompts museumgoers to “Acknowledge Labor” they see in their own lives by writing a tribute and hanging it from a railing. Bus drivers, custodians, parents, the labor of navigating disability—reading through the dozens of cards feels invasive. Then you realize that’s the point: talking about the things we don’t talk about, questioning why we don’t talk about them. It’s conceptually sound, but the gesture rings hollow; like a reshared Instagram story, the cards turn the supposedly acknowledged laborer into a foil for the writer. Yes, as Terry’s statement suggests, making invisible labor visible may be the first step in ameliorating the burdens it imposes—but then what?

When his art career picked up, enabling him to retire from commercial farm work, Narsiso Martinez (no relation to Patrick) questioned the ethics of continuing to tell his former peers’ stories. He paints their portraits on collapsed produce boxes, juxtaposing bucolic brand iconography with the living, breathing workers pulling fruits and vegetables from the field. He’s said that Self-Portrait En La Cherry (2020) marked a turning point. It shows him in the field solemnly harvesting cherries, clad in protective eyewear and strapped with an industrial basket. It’s a reminder that he knows the experience intimately and can represent it honestly.

Material Conditions

In the wrong hands, a jumble of found materials quickly turns to kitsch. But I was surprised at how effectively the nontraditional materials used throughout the show evoked vivid scenes. Though unnoticed in the matrix of daily life, old magazines, cardboard, and neon signs are unmistakable symbols of poverty and struggle when hung in a museum—symbols that promote a visceral rather than psychological response. Instead of asking you to think about others’ struggles (as you might by writing a note about them, displaying it, and going on your way), they trip a physical response, at least they do for me. Like the headache Labor of Love’s neon and tile cues, materials become a shorthand to present familiar scenes in a fresh perspective—to make visible thoroughly normalized unfair labor practices.  

This reverence for ephemeral, disposable materials like cardboard and magazine pages—literal byproducts of “ambitious lifestyle choices”—becomes an overwhelming metaphor for the people represented in the work, who are likewise treated as ephemeral and disposable. The best work here helps remove some shine, revealing the ugliness required to produce what we’ve come to see as beautiful.