Barbara Nitke at University of Rochester
November 21st - December 10th, 2024
Opening Reception
Thursday, November 21st from 7-9pm
The Hartnett Gallery
University of Rochester
Panel Discussion | Barbara Nitke, Lizzie Borden, & Antonia Crane
Thursday, November 21st from 7:30-9pm
The Hartnett Gallery at University of Rochester
Storage APT is thrilled to announce Barbara Nitke in Sex/Labor, an upcoming exhibition at University of Rochester.
When describing the feminism of Lizzie Borden’s Working Girls (1986)—as defined against her two preceding films Regrouping (1976) and Born in Flames (1983)—the critic So Mayer commented: “Feminism itself has been curtailed, and made newly urgent, by the need to work within capitalism.” Sex/Labor was conceived of in the spirit of Borden’s Working Girls, which traces the everyday activities that occur across a day in the life of sex workers. This exhibition brings together contemporary art that elaborates on Borden’s depiction of sex work as a job taken up to pay rent, put food on the table, and make art.
The artworks featured in Sex/Labor—made by Antonia Crane, Barbara Nitke, Chichi Castillo, Sasha Waters Freyer, Alyssa Wood, Weixin Zhuang, Katina Bitsicas, Lena Chen, Maggie Oates, David Kim, and Emily Broad—represent both the physical and emotional forms of labor that sex work entails. This labor is constituted by: exhaustion, establishing boundaries, moments of joy and play, and kinship with clients and fellow sex workers that extend beyond the nuclear family. This exhibition does not claim to fully capture all the complexities of sex as a form of labor. Rather, it proposes two things. First, that the history of sex work has a clear significance in contemporary visual culture. And second, that the sex workers’ rights movement is an urgent matter of our time that relates to larger complications in the distribution of wealth and labor in late capitalism. In a moment when many of us struggle to buy groceries and pay our bills, the decriminalization of sex work could herald a new era for understanding how we work to live.
–Exhibition Statement by Emily Broad & Bridget Fleming
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Opening Reception
Thursday, November 21st from 7-9pm
The Hartnett Gallery at University of RochesterPanel Discussion | Barbara Nitke, Lizzie Borden, & Antonia Crane
Thursday, November 21st from 7:30-9pm
The Hartnett Gallery at University of Rochester -
Barbara Nitke (b. 1950, Virginia) is a photographer whose focus spans from behind-the-scenes of hardcore porn sets to constructed narratives and portraiture. Nitke’s work is found in collections including the Kinsey Institute, IN; The New Hampshire Institute of Art, NH; Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland; Leather Archives and Museum, IN; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, NY; and the Museum of Sex, NY. Nitke has been shown nationally and internationally. Selections of her work are collected in two monographs, Kiss of Fire: A Romantic View of Sadomasochism (introduction by A. D. Coleman) (2003) and American Ecstasy (introduction by Arthur C. Danto) (2012). Nitke is self taught in photography, having studied literature and philosophy at Baruch College, City University of New York. She has been on the faculty of School of Visual Arts since 1992.