When I arrived at the Gamble House for the “Upstairs, Downstairs” tour, I was clearly the only one in the group who knew in advance about the art installation Dirty Laundry. I wondered how our guide would explain the anachronistic additions artists Karen Schwenkmeyer and Lisa Mann had placed throughout the prodigious Craftsman home, built in 1908 by storied Pasadena firm Greene & Greene for some heirs to the Procter & Gamble fortune.
It turns out, the docent didn’t even acknowledge the sorrowful tea towels and bedroom linens, screen-printed with the oral histories of early twentieth-century domestic workers, Schwenkmeyer and Mann had temporarily installed in the servants’ quarters. In a bathroom, a stylized heap of Ivory soap bars (an invention of another Gamble heir) was poised atop a tub bursting with mop cords, glimpsed through a dangling array of body scrubbers, brooms, and dusters. The words “dirty” and “pure”—cribbed from Procter & Gamble’s old ads—had been fogged into the mirror.
While our docent tallied the Gambles’ generosity (mainly the “free” food and sh…
