Scrub Ladies 1937

Santos Zingale made this black and white print, Scrub Ladies, in 1937. Look at the marks in the ground they’re cleaning and the way they echo the lines of the rain coming down on the window. You can feel the humidity of the room, and the endlessness of the work. I really like the scrub lady in the foreground. She’s got her feet up, toes digging into the ground. Her labour looks exhausting, thankless. I bet Zingale empathized with these women. He worked a lot of odd jobs to get by, as a sign painter, and in a print shop. Maybe he felt the weight of manual labour himself. There’s so much tension in their bodies, the weight of life is so palpable here. I think about all of the labor that is unseen, and who ends up doing that work. Artists are always in conversation with one another, across time, inspiring one another’s creativity.