Art: Hard-Working Housewife

One of the most straightforward and unambiguous art exhibits in Manhattan last week occupied a table in an upstairs room of a 57th Street gallery. It was a polyptych of five small panels hinged together and somewhat pompously titled A Tribute to the American Working People. The four side panels represent a county fair, a parlor, a farm and a schoolroom, all crowded. The center panel portrays a workman with the expression of a weary Punch, standing before a green factory facade full of faces.

Pretty Honore Sharrer, 30, a Cambridge, Mass, housewife, spent five years and wore out roughly 225 tiny...