Marcia Tucker’s Domestic Politics: Art and Craft in the 1990s

Abstract

While today process-driven work affiliated with craft, outsider art, and folk art is increasingly considered a viable politicized or conceptual practice, this essay focuses on the 1996 New Museum exhibition, A Labor of Love, in order to examine Marcia Tucker’s unconventional use of “domestic” politics to promote and activate objects often read as bound to their materiality. This article offers an analysis of the exhibition as a challenge to the politics of value that supports established aesthetic categories within the museum to enact a broader renegotiation of those values that extend beyond the museum’s walls. Marcia Tucker took craft’s conventionally domestic station as license to theorize ways in which quotidian strategies (both those undertaken by the artists, and those deployed by Tucker) could prompt controversy and debate. By featuring connections among artifacts based on questions of labor, the exhibition highlighted process as an issue infused with political meaning and potential. The aesthetic hybrids on display were, moreover, complemented with domestic structures for viewing and interaction; the introduction of music, home furnishings, and a domestic format enacted persistent references to private spaces. In this way, A Labor of Love aligned the museum within the larger framework of lived experience, forging a complex dialogue with agency and care as practiced outside the museum.