While historically set apart from “work” and studied as a form of “leisure,” the arts have always required laboring bodies. The three papers in this panel consider what we can learn about gender, race, and class relations in the nineteenth and twentieth century US when we examine the performance arts as a form of labor. The panelists will make their arguments through historical analysis and a demonstration of one aspect of their subjects’ artistic practice. The first panelist looks at the art of challenge dancing, focusing on the Black and Irish working-class men and women who earned money as competitive jig dancers in antebellum America. Challenge dancing was more than an occasional leisure activity for the urban masses, this paper argues; it was a recognized sport, a form of remunerative labor, and a means of upward mobility for the truly talented. The second panelist investigates a diverse coalition of working-class artists in Progressive Era Chicago who engaged in spoken performance as a form of political labor. The author asks why people who devoted the bulk of their daily lives to manual labor understood interpretive speech as cultural and political work. These Progressive Era Chicagoans not only put artistic practice in conversation with labor organizers and civic reformers, argues this paper, they laid the foundations for contemporary bottom-up, ensemble-based theatre from the local to the international scale. The third panelist examines variety shows developed by white working-class men in Branson, Missouri in the 1960s. These performers refused the effeminate designation “artist” and adopted instead the term “entertainer” to distance themselves from the emasculated hillbilly stereotypes they were performing and reframe their artistic labor as masculine and productive. Their success in smoothing out this contradiction, this paper argues, paved the way for Branson to become a multimillion dollar mecca of live entertainment. Overall, these papers ask us to think differently about the arts and labor, about what art is and who produces it, and about the purposes to which it has been put by working-class people.