A Conversation with Morgan Levy
"We don't touch art in the museum — I want people to touch this work."
“I wasn’t so much interested in women working in male-dominated spaces. I was really interested in women-identified individuals — and ‘woman’ is a very open, porous category for me — changing space,” Morgan Levy told me when we spoke for the first time earlier this year. “I was interested in somebody changing space because they wanted to; shaping these forces that were larger than themselves with really modest gestures.”
She began to research; she struck up a friendship with a woman named Stacy — formerly the only female employee working on a quarry in New England, and now working behind a desk on the same site — and began to make work in collaboration with her. “In this political climate, I needed a feminist world-building project, and I needed a scaffolding on which to climb out of the murk that we were living in. That was really the genesis for the work,” she says.
That first project laid the foundations for what was eventually to become Spark of a Nail, now being exhibited at Baxter St, New York. Despite its context — of construction, heavy materials and machines, labour — the work is delicate and dreamlike. The dust, grit, and glass involved in this speculative building project diffuse and refract the light, so the women working with them are framed, blurred, surrounded by glitter. Pictured all together, it’s hard not to begin to wonder or imagine what these particular tradeswomen are building; what, exactly, their project is.
As Levy researched, she found that documentary photographs of female labourers were largely relegated to archives, associated with histories of the women’s separatist movement, for example. “We just don’t see those images — of women changing space, and building a different world.”
“What would we think about construction jobs if we imagined an entire job site filled with women?” she asks. “Would we think about this work differently? Would we think about how we build spaces differently? I’ve met tradeswomen who talk about driving down the street and, seeing a building, getting to say to their kid: ‘I built that’.”
Spark of a Nail is on view at Baxter St, 154 Ludlow Street, NYC, until January 28th, 2026.
AZ: Spark of a Nail combines documentary images with staged and performed scenarios. Could you tell me about the decision to combine these different kinds of photographs — what function the combination served, and how you began to explore them together?
ML: As I researched, I was interested in how historically images of labour in the US were dominated by singular heroic white men; rarely did you see images of collective support, or anybody in a minority group. When you’re in the actual spaces where this work takes place, it’s anything but solitary. Of course there are moments of solitude, but there’s so much support; I watched so much solidarity amongst these women. So I wanted to re-make it, but remake it as a more potent image that suggested something broader, that was left open to the viewer to think through emotionally. Documentary images are prone to telling a viewer what to think, and I’m not interested in making pictures that tell you what to think; I’m interested in making pictures that encourage you to ask questions.
And so I knew, early on, that a documentary picture wasn’t going to have the necessary components. Performance has always been an undergirding part of my work — there’s something I need to have happen for a picture to feel like mine, and it’s hard for me to find that through pure observation.
I realised that if I took the camera away for a little bit, and just watched, it allowed my imagination to wander much more. I could see things that were really happening, and at the same time begin to imagine images that were a slightly transformed version of what I was seeing — slightly more photographic, somehow better suited for an image. I’ve taken some liberties in certain places, with the tradeswomen’s consent, and so performance became a necessity; and that kind of re-staging creates an opening for conversation. It made the work more participatory. I never feel good walking into a space and hiding behind my camera; that feels really uncomfortable to me.
And so it was a way for me to be educated; it was a way for my creativity to blossom; and it was a way for these tradeswomen and me to engage in picture-making together, and to talk about photographs. It’s fun to talk about images with people who aren’t always steeped completely in them, but absolutely have thoughts about how important images are, and what being represented means.
AZ: It’s striking — the ways that, as you began to collaborate, the logic of labour entered the speculative project of the work; all of you building, in different ways, separately and together. What kinds of responses were you hearing from the women during the process?
ML: In 2022, just outside of Seattle, I started photographing the back of my camera, and then turning the pictures black and white on my phone so I could show my participants. One woman – and for reference, when I use the word ‘woman’, I’m thinking of Sara Ahmed, who describes the category of womanhood as “anyone who travels under the sign of woman” – she looked at the images and said, “oh, that’s what a picture can do”. What I understood that to mean is that while she was in the scene, she didn’t really see what I was seeing; she didn’t understand why I was making this picture. But through this transformative act of photographing, through the transformative act of rendering a colourful world in black and white, it became something else. It reminded me of those amazing moments of being young, and first seeing an image emerge in the black and white darkroom.
Other people have just said very heartfelt, very straightforward things like, “I needed to see this”, and “people need to see us, we’re here”. That has always been a green light for me to keep going — that there’s this shared need.
AZ: There’s an image of a woman resting, seemingly exhausted, against a pallet of cinder blocks, another woman’s hand on her shoulder. Can you speak to the decision to include images of rest alongside those depicting labour? Why was that important?
ML: Something that has been said to me, again and again, is that a cis man can sit down on a job site, and nobody will question his ability to do the work; but if a tradeswoman is seen sitting, it immediately calls into question whether or not she can do it. The idea that rest is somehow conditional, that rest is somehow gendered — that a resting body is somehow an incapable body — is preposterous to me. Shouldn’t we all have moments of rest and care and compassion?
So these pictures were essentially a way to make trouble, and to do the thing you’re not supposed to do, and to do the thing I believe everybody should have a right to do. And then, thinking back to the history of 20th century images of labour in the US — there’s also a lineage of images that I’m thinking about how to subvert.
And then there’s the metaphorical aspect: that the work of social justice is ongoing, and exhausting, and you need to take breaks to come back in. You have to work, and you have to rest. To me, that makes sense as a way to build a world, both literally and metaphorically. So when I speak about this work, there is the metaphorical component of world-building, of imagining something different; one can’t labour at that all the time. There have to be moments of rest in order to sustain that over the long term.
AZ: Does one of these aspects feel more important or central to the work — on one hand, the metaphorical aspect of imagining and world-building, and on the other, the practical and social aspect of creating visibility for the female labourers you met and worked with?
ML: I’m most drawn to art that is incredibly spacious; that gives me, as a viewer, a lot of room to move around in, a lot of room to think, and imagine inside of. And I wanted this work to be that; to be spacious, not to tell a viewer what to think, not to be prescriptive.
I have five years of research inside me, which is historical and touches a lot of different things — from the history of photography, to labour histories in the US, to other political histories in the US, social movements in the US, to urban design. Part of my brain is holding on to very concrete information, and another part is really trying to take that information alongside the experiences that I’m learning about, and hearing about, and churning them into something that feels tied to all of the research, but in a way that’s open.
That’s how the work lives in me: there are pockets of thought, from concrete to more amorphous to more emotional, and an instinctive consideration about how I can blend those things into an experience of this work that does what I hope it does — which is stay open, and breathing, and filled with a lot of space for a viewer to find meaning.
AZ: That reminds me of something I’ve read you say elsewhere: you describe the work as destabilising a tough/soft binary. Could you tell me some more about that?
ML: I’m sympathetic to why people like things to sit in neat categories. They lend themselves to order and control; and when you’re afraid of something, one seeks order and control. And yet, while I’m sympathetic to it, I find it problematic — I find moving from a place of fear, in general, to be problematic. So I try to ask people to walk into a destabilised space in a welcoming way, because I recognise on some level why it could be frightening for some people; why the idea of destabilising categories could feel threatening, because they mean you have to live in the grey. And living in the grey is not always an easy choice, but it is a far more freeing and breathing choice, and one I choose to live in as much as I’m able.
For me, this notion that something can only be tough or can only be soft, as a personality or a material — it’s not true to the world. These binary experiences aren’t true to a lived life, to what being in the world is like. It is a wildly complex thing, with many varying shades. And so, for me, this is political, and social, and personal. Again — that’s why I want to leave things open, because that’s really what life is: a really big, open-ended question that we try to impose all sorts of shapes around to try to make sense of; but ultimately, it’s porous and messy. That’s what makes it exciting, and also sometimes scary.
AZ: I’m curious about how much our view, in these images, is somehow obstructed or obscured — there are figures behind a sheet, or muddled by reflections, or, in general, a sense that we’re not quite seeing directly or clearly. I wonder if those visual decisions were a reflection of the ambiguity you’re talking about.
ML: It’s an invitation to look closely. When there’s a certain level of ambiguity or opacity, it creates some dream space, or an imaginative space; it’s potent for me, as an artist, to create that for a viewer. It also speaks to the ideas of this work: about visibility, and the things that are there in plain sight that we often fail to see, the bodies we fail to see.
And then there’s an element of playfulness. There’s a lot of humour in this work, and there’s a lot of humour in this world, and it’s a strategy for survival. It’s a strategy to make it through the day. So the work is a combination of all of those things. There are moments when you can feel the tradeswoman and me playing, and we are. We are playing in the way I played with my friends growing up; we’re play-acting together in many of these images. And that’s powerful as adults, too, in a different way.
AZ: Did making this work change you, or your practice, or your thinking?
ML: At the most basic level, when I walk around the city now, a construction site means something so different to me. I think: who’s there, whose needs aren’t being met? Is this a space where people feel good? Is this a good work environment? I think about my immediate landscape differently.
I think about so much legislation we could pass that we don’t pass, and how painful that is. I made bookmarks for the opening, in collaboration with Volume, a wonderful graphic design studio, where I asked a series of tradeswomen to send me pictures from their job sites at sunrise. Many of them take pictures at sunrise — it’s a perk of the job that you get this amazing view.
But of course, the sunrise is not ungendered, in the sense that one of the main barriers for women in the trades is daycare options. Is there a daycare open before sunrise? That is the question that’s written on the back of these bookmarks, and on the front are their sunrise pictures. We choose to not have that in the US. I constantly think about the things we could do, and that we just don’t do, as a nation; who that fails, and who that hurts.
In terms of my practice, this work became an incredible opportunity to think about new ways to present images, to really think about how the material presentation of the work is supporting the images. It feels as though a whole new space has been opened in my practice. I learned some woodworking skills to get some work on the wall, because of budget limitations, and so what felt like a deficit became an opportunity, and that was wonderful. But I think it’s too soon to tell how this work will have shaped my practice. I think you need some distance from the work to kind of look back and then see.
AZ: Last time we met, you were telling me about the comments you received when some of the work was exhibited at Large Glass — the framing, the hang. How much has the physical space of the gallery at Baxter St, and the installation of the work, come into people’s responses to it?
ML: People really seem to respond to the presentation of this work, which is exciting. It felt so freeing to think, okay, what if I throw all the rules away, and just dream up what I want to see? I let go of any preconceived notion of how this work should be shown, and tried to think through what would best serve the work. Like: what is going to get these ideas into the physical space of the gallery with even more immediacy? I’m constantly thinking about how people are presenting pictures, and in a world where we engage with images so much on a flat digital screen, I need the work to do something different. I want the work to be something that is best seen in person, because it engenders an entirely different response.
I have a piece that you can touch — I want people to touch this work. You know, this is the written and unwritten rule of art: we don’t touch art in the museum. So it’s fun to have something you get to break the rules with a little bit. I had to tell people at the opening to go and touch it, to let people know it was okay. I think it’s so funny, how afraid people are to do something like that. We’re so conditioned to be afraid to touch art! So it became an opportunity to think about the pictures living and breathing as autonomous objects in space.
AZ: It seems very apt that the practical decisions you made — shooting in black and white for visual consistency, for example, or learning woodworking because of budget limitations — have ended up opening out onto the metaphorical project of the work; how much the form has come to reflect the content, even if those decisions originally arose from a place of pragmatism.
ML: That’s something that you have to be alive to: the possibility that when you meet constraint in some way, that you can think about how to take that constraint and make something generative out of it. I feel like I’ve had that drilled into me through different art educations: that it is the job of artists to take problems, and pivot, and work with them. And so whenever I’ve been met with any hurdle, I’ve tried to think about how I can get over it creatively. I think I’ve tried to instil in myself that it’s never an option for an artist to say, well, I’m stuck.
If we’re creative thinkers, we have to think creatively in all capacities. I’ve tasked myself with that. That’s not to say that I haven’t tried slightly more practical approaches to problem solving as my first attempt to get over a hurdle, like seeking more funding. But throwing my hands up — that’s never an option for me. In general, I try to figure out how to think generatively. How can I take something that feels challenging, or like an obstruction, and make it into something? It’s an opportunity.
Every month I ask each artist to recommend a favourite book or two: fiction, non-fiction, plays, poems. My hope is that, if you enjoyed the above conversation, this might be a way for it to continue.
Morgan Levy’s recommended reading:
Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics — bell hooks
Scaffolding — Lauren Elkin
We’ll Call You If We Need You, Experiences of Women Working in Construction — Susan Eisenberg
Boulder — Eva Baltasar
Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World — Leslie Kern
A huge thanks to Morgan Levy, and to you for reading. You can reply to this email if you have any thoughts you’d like to share directly, or you can write a comment below:
A fantastic interview and beautiful work by Morgan Levy. Thank you for sharing this.