Barbara Zucker: The Second Oldest Profession, an exhibition and book launch
at Duane Thomas Gallery
February 12 - March 12, 2026Reception and Book Launch: Feb 12 from 6pm-8pm
We hope you can join us at Duane Thomas Gallery at 137 West Broadway, 3rd Fl, on February 12 from 6pm to 8pm to celebrate the open of Barbara Zucker's exhibition of works on paper and sculptures which are related to the release of her book, The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled by Abbeville Press (Hardcover, Feb 24th)
ABOUT THE EXHIBITION Duane Thomas Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of sculptures and works on paper by Barbara Zucker, opening on February 12, 2026, with a reception and book launch from 6 to 8 PM. The exhibition coincides with the publication of Zucker’s book, The Second Oldest Profession: The Wet Nurse, Revered and Reviled. The exhibition brings together Zucker’s decades-long research into physical form, presenting sculptures 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 exhibition will be on view from February 12 through March 14, 2026. Copies of book will be available for sale at the opening.
ABOUT THE BOOK In this book, conceived as both a social history and a feminist act of reparation, Zucker uncovers the forgotten—perhaps deliberately buried—occupation of wet nursing. The book’s publication coincides with a show of Zucker’s sculptures exploring breastfeeding and the female body, several of which are featured in the book, at the Duane Thomas Gallery in New York City. The wet nurse—a woman hired to breastfeed a child not her own—is an age-old occupation; in fact, archaeologists have discovered the tomb of Tutankhamen’s wet nurse. In modern Europe and the United States, wet nursing persisted into the early twentieth century, when bottles and formula rendered it obsolete. This labor was inherently layered with issues of misogyny, race, and class, as mothers who had recently given birth ceased nourishing their own baby to provide for their entire family. At one end of the social scale, wealthy families hired wet nurses to spare mothers the necessity of nursing; at the other, foundling babies were fed by wet nurses employed by orphanages. Zucker ranges across eras and cultures, revealing the practices surrounding wet nursing and the social attitudes toward the women who worked as wet nurses, almost always out of financial necessity. The nurses would typically be evaluated for this vital job with preliminary tests, ranging from the relatively straightforward physical examination and milk tasting to strange, arbitrary tests, such as watching how a drop of milk rolls down a stone. Chapters explore many interrelated aspects of wet nursing, from the early efforts to save premature babies and interspecies nursing (with the goat’s teat the most common stand-in for the human breast), to the fates of the nurses’ own babies left behind. Zucker’s lively text is abundantly illustrated with paintings, prints, and photographs she has collected over years of research, as well as her own arresting drawings and sculptures inspired by the topic. The Second Oldest Profession will be essential and provocative reading for anyone interested in women’s history.