NEW YORK, NY.- Duane Thomas Gallery is presenting an exhibition of works on paper and sculpture by artist Barbara Zucker. The exhibition coincides with the publication and launch of Zucker’s book, The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled, published by Abbeville Press.

Conceived as both a social history and a feminist act of reparation, The Second Oldest Profession investigates the largely erased history of wet nursing—an ancient occupation shaped by class, race, misogyny, and economic necessity. The exhibition brings Zucker’s decades-long research into physical form, presenting works that explore breastfeeding, labor, care, and the female body. Several works on view are featured in the book, underscoring the deep interrelationship between Zucker’s visual practice and her scholarship.

The wet nurse—a woman hired to breastfeed a child not her own—was once ubiquitous across cultures and social classes, from royal households to orphanages. Zucker’s work confronts the emotional, political, and bodily realities of this labor, examining both its reverence and its stigmatization. Through sculpture, drawing, and archival reference, she gives presence to women whose work sustained generations yet remained marginalized and morally policed.

Zucker’s artistic language is at once direct and poetic, combining material sensitivity with conceptual rigor. This body of work challenge sentimentalized narratives of motherhood, instead foregrounding the physical demands, sacrifices, and social inequities embedded in reproductive labor. The exhibition invites viewers to reconsider the histories—and ongoing realities—of care work through a feminist lens.

Barbara Zucker (b. 1940) is an artist, writer and professor working in sculpture, drawing and installation. Playing with post-minimalism, her earliest “chair sculptures” of the 1960’s challenged the dominate art dictates of the time, as did her later works from the 1970’s and 1980’s that are most closely associated with the Pattern and Decoration Movement. Her elegant and often minimal forms frequently utilize industrial materials and employ visual humor to reference the politics around women’s bodies.

Zucker’s work has been exhibited at: The New Museum, NY; The Sculpture Center, NY; The Drawing Center, NY; Museum of Arts and Design; NY, Artists’ Space; NY; Queens Museum of Art, NY; American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Princeton University, NJ; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT; The Hood Art Museum, Dartmouth University, NH; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, NY; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art; Holly Solomon Gallery, NY; Robert Miller Gallery, NY; Sidney Janis Gallery NY; PPOW gallery, NY; DC Moore Gallery, NY and at the Accola Griefen Fine Art in their 2012 exhibition on the Pattern and Decoration Movement. Recently Zucker was included in the largest exhibition on the Pattern and Decoration Movement to date titled With Pleasure at LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which was also accompanied by a major book documenting the era.

The artist’s work is included in numerous private and corporate collections, as well as The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vera List Collection, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Bryn Mawr College, Bard College, Kresge Art Museum, University of Colorado Art Museum, and University of Mass. at Amherst, among many others.

Reviews and articles on Zucker’s work have been published in: The New York Times, Hyperallergic, Artnet News, The Brooklyn Rail, The Art Newspaper, Artforum, Art in America, The Village Voice, Ms. magazine, The Boston Globe, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Washington Post, The LA Times, Art New England, and many others. Zucker has received the National Endowment for the Arts in Sculpture, The Giverny Fellowship, Lila Wallace Foundation, France, and such residencies as Yaddo.

Born in Philadelphia Zucker received a Bachelor of Science degree at the University of Michigan before receiving a Master of Arts from Hunter College. In addition to her forthcoming book Zucker has also written for Art News, Hyperallergic, The Village Voice, The Art Journal, Painters on Painting, M/E/A/N/I/N/G - Heresies and Women’s Studies. In 1972 Zucker was one of the first women who conceived of and founded A.I.R. Gallery, an early and influential women’s art gallery that thrives to this day in New York.

The exhibition is on view at Duane Thomas Gallery from February 12 through March 12, 2026. Copies of The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled will be available at the gallery.