Jeremy Deller Portrait of a Care Giver, 2026
Portrait of a Care Giver is a participatory project by Jeremy Deller presented across San Francisco, Atlanta, and Seattle. At each art fair, scheduled life drawing sessions are led by a facilitator and feature models drawn from a consistent set of caregiving roles. Participants include nurses, home health aides, public school teachers, art teachers, early childhood educators, caregivers for elders, and foster parents. Individuals are invited locally and opt in. The focus is on roles rather than personal narratives.
The Alternative Art School collaborates on the project by identifying and coordinating experienced life drawing instructors in each city. Working with local facilitators allows the structure of the sessions to remain consistent while responding to the specific conditions of each location.
The project places people whose work involves attending to others into a situation where they are themselves attended to through sustained looking and drawing. Repeated across cities, the same caregiving categories appear in different bodies, ages, and contexts, allowing comparison without explanation. The work relies on structure and repetition rather than storytelling.
Portrait of a Care Giver extends Deller’s long standing interest in social roles, collective labor, and the everyday structures that shape public life. Like earlier works that brought non art world participants into art contexts, the project operates through simple rules and familiar forms. Here, the conventional format of life drawing is used as a tool for observation rather than idealization, shifting attention from spectacle to function.