In the elevator on our way up to the art gallery, a young woman speaks to the toddler in her stroller: “Can you say, Barbara Zucker?” The small girl obliges: “Barbara Zucker!” “Can you say paintings?” asks her mother. “Paintings!”
I smile, reminded of my own childhood spent accompanying Zucker—my mother—to art galleries, studios, museums, schools. Never mind that she is not known as a painter, though she occasionally makes drawings. An abstract sculptor, Zucker has been making prescient, absurdist, feminist, deceptively simple-seeming art since the 1960s, often about the female body and its complex role in our society.
In 1972, not long after she became my mother, Zucker co-founded one of the nation’s first all-women’s art galleries. My childhood, like that of many artists’ children, was spent making playgrounds of the spaces where our parents created and showed work. We chased each other around installations, guilelessly participated in performance art, hid under the wine table.
Tonight, I’ve come to the opening of my mother’s exhibition of works on paper and sculpture coinciding with the launch of her new book, The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled, published by Abbeville Press. As I mingle with the crowd, I realize had I still been a school-aged child, I would have been mortified by the subject matter of this show.
A sculpture of a small breast wearing a lace hat modeled on traditional French wet nurse headgear hangs on one wall. There are drawings of breasts, and breastmilk, illustrating fascinating and bizarre “milk tests” and other superstitious rituals performed on women’s bodies throughout history. In the center of the gallery, a single disembodied breast, cast in powder-coated aluminum, seems suspended in the air, buoyed by a stream of milk arcing from the nipple to the floor. I snap a few photos, and briefly wonder what my husband and teen-aged kids would make of this scene.
My children had more conventional upbringings than I did—theirs were not saturated with feminist art made to reclaim the female body as subject and viewer. My children didn’t exist, as I did, in continual, lively dialogue about the politics of the female body, or its parts. As my mother writes in her introductory pages, “I have thought a lot about breasts, particularly as they relate to nursing, and specifically as they functioned as an economic asset for women who worked as wet nurses, nourishing millions of infants for thousands of years throughout the world, helping to keep our species alive.”
The new books fly off the sale table; my mother signs them for the attendees, many of whom I recognize from my childhood. Like my mother, these women are gray, wrinkled; some wield canes. Like her, they are lifelong artists, fiercely ambitious, curious and engaged with the world, still creating meaningful work. Many are mothers, and grandmothers. Tonight, I’m the de facto “communal” daughter of the artist. They take my face in their veined hands and exclaim that I look exactly as I did when I was six.
Barbara Zucker, The Second Oldest Profession, installation view Duane Thomas Gallery 2026. Courtesy the artist and Duane Thomas Gallery.
Someone asks, “Gina, what do you think?”
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning that my mother was forced to stop nursing me two days after my birth, due to my infant jaundice and a belief in the expediency of formula in treating the condition. No doubt the fact that I was bottle fed allowed her to go back to work immediately. My mother always had an insatiable need to be in her studio. Even when she was with me, whom she adored, she struggled with resentment that she couldn’t make art while taking care of me. She has since apologized for her frequent absences during my early life, when I was often with babysitters more than with her.
When, years later, in the era of renewed belief in “breast is best,” I struggled to nurse my first child, I became consumed with making it work. At one point I barely slept, pumped every hour, kept a painstaking log of my daughter’s formula versus breast milk intake, and took off-book lactation-inducing medicine shipped from Australia.
Had I been born jaundiced before formula existed, according to The Second Oldest Profession, I would likely have been taken out doors and placed in the sun to help my liver break down the bilirubin. As for my daughter, she would probably have had a wet nurse.
What do I think? When it comes to my mother, the child me will always have complex feelings, fraught and full of love.
When it comes to the new book and exhibit by the artist Barbara Zucker, the adult me simply loves it, and believes it should be recognized.
—Gina Zucker is a writer and adjunct professor of creative writing and literature at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
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