How An Artist And Museum Conspired To Give A Delivery Worker PTO

A delivery bike now sits inside MoMA PS1 as both artwork and working object, and the arrangement says as much about New York labor as it does about contemporary photography. For Fields Harrington, an artist and cyclist, the project began with a collision in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, when a delivery worker was clipped by a car and his groceries scattered across the street. Harrington's first instinct was practical: ask who to call. The answer, he realized, was no boss at all, only an algorithm.

That encounter sharpened the premise of Harrington's photographs, which he has been making across New York City since 2024. The images focus on delivery bikes rather than riders, isolating gloves strapped to handlebars, reflective tape, flags, stickers, and other small acts of customization. Seen from the street, these details can vanish. Seen through Harrington's 35mm camera, they become signs of community, migration, and self-definition within precarious work.

The series is included in“Greater New York,” the recurring survey at MoMA PS1 in Queens, on view through August 17. In a gesture that folds labor directly into the exhibition, the museum rents a delivery worker's bike and pays its owner, Gustavo Ajche, $21.44 an hour for the hours the museum is open. For one week each month, the bike is installed as a kind of living presence at the entrance to the show. When it is not there, Ajche is back at work.

The installation also includes a notification that sounds every 21 minutes and 44 seconds, a reference to the wage that Ajche and other delivery workers have advocated for and won. Harrington's photographs, meanwhile, push against the usual hierarchy of documentary image-making. They recall Realist worker portraits, but they shift attention from the human figure to the tools and surfaces that structure the job.

Harrington has been thinking about rest as a subject for some time. Earlier projects such as“indefatigueable” at Petrine Gallery in Paris and“non-exhaustive work” at KAJE in Brooklyn approached exhaustion as both a bodily condition and a political one. In this case, the idea becomes literal as well as conceptual. Harrington worked with Gustavo Ajche, co-founder of Los Deliveristas Unidos, and with architect Elsa Ponce, who helped design rest hubs for delivery workers across the city. Those spaces offer shelter from extreme weather, bathrooms, and places to recharge phones and bikes.

The result is a work that links photography to the infrastructure of labor with unusual precision. It asks viewers to notice what is usually overlooked: the customized bike, the worker's time, and the fragile systems that keep the city moving.

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