WORKSTYLES

The Social and Domestic Ecologies of Mildred’s Lane

For nearly three decades, Mildred’s Lane – a 93-acre historic agrarian landscape in northeastern Pennsylvania – has drawn hundreds of artists, thinkers, and makers into an ongoing experiment in social sculpture, collective labor, and ecological life. Workstyles is the first sustained account of what happened there, and why it matters.

The book is structured around seventeen Labor Portraits, allegorical and photographic, each introducing a section. The Ambassador of Entanglement: expanding overseer, part director, part steward. The Master Hooshress: one who shapes domestic space through conceptual arrangement and installation. The Digestion Choreographer: architect of the Kitchen Laboratory’s food systems. Fourteen more Labors complete a feminist, decentralized model of working and living rooted not in corporate theory but in the agrarian site itself; where household labor becomes sculptural and political practice, hierarchy gives way to fluid roles, and the entire site becomes the artwork.

Part compendium, part memoir, part feminist manifesto, and part archive, Workstyles traces the project’s intimate origins in contemporary motherhood; a son grew up here, a mother built a world around him and follows that world as it expands to include hundreds of collaborators working across the intersections of contemporary art, landscape, research, politics, food, symposia, and performance in everyday life.

Workstyles contributes a new vocabulary for understanding sculpture as lived infrastructure: behavioral, domestic, ecological, and collective. Mildred’s Lane is a lived practice. This book is its record.