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 shelter their servants received, described in a cheerful tone that reminded me of how my middle school teachers framed slavery), a set of large fearful eyes, rendered in the style of a woodblock print, pleaded for help. They had been printed onto a set of curtains, whose hem featured an utterance of an unknown domestic: “I do not know what minute one or the other members in the family may pop in … & the door between rooms does not lock.”
The tragic testimonies surfaced in Dirty Laundry weren’t taken from actual Gamble House staff. Still, their disjointedness against the tour guide’s upbeat script was jarring in the extreme. Outside, ICE agents prowled the streets for immigrant workers, some of whom work for modern-day Gambles. How easy it is to scrub away history.