Care: It is priceless, often uncompensated, and more necessary to the continuation of human civilization as we know it than fossil fuels. It is the thing that gets us out of infancy when we cannot lift our own heads and the thing that helps us through the agonizing transition of death. In between, it preserves us, heals us, educates us, clears away our refuse, laughs at our jokes, and permits us to have options and make change. If you think you don’t need care, think again. Chances are, someone is working to care for you right now, at this very moment. It’s worth asking yourself if you deign to pay that person or even say thank you.
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Who is the preeminent figure of care? If we are speaking in secular terms (I don’t have much room to consider alternatives), the answer is mothers. Mothers care and keep us alive. It’s who they apparently are. But the mother is a tricky figure because she always seems to fail to meet our expectations or maintain the identity that society has chosen for her. The art world has recently taken “her” up as a preeminent figure of our times, dedicating numerous surveys to motherhood and emphasizing the creative-procreative roles of artists like Käthe Kollwitz and Alice Neel. The trend seems to reflect a collective anxiety not just about care and where to find it, but about vulnerability more broadly. For mothers seem at once preeminently strong and preeminently exploitable; we don’t compensate mothers, and we often criticize them irrationally and without mercy. Just consider Jung-a Kim, who had to hire private security after she failed to keep her children out of the shot during her political analyst and BBC newscaster-partner’s from-home report on the situation in North Korea in 2017. If we look to mothers now in our museums and galleries, it may be because their ambiguous and often imperiled situation mirrors that of the democratic citizen more broadly.
Since the 2010s, there have been a growing number of exhibitions related to mothering and birth. In October 2011, performance artist Marni Kotak, having designed her ideal birthing space at Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn, gave birth to her son Ajax in a public event. Two years later, artist Natalie Loveless initiated a series of events under the umbrella of what she terms “new maternalisms,” conceiving of the work of creating and caring for children as a site from which serious art can—seamlessly and unpretentiously—emerge. The art and artists Loveless brought together involved neither mere depictions of motherhood nor exemplary mothers. Rather, they and the “New Maternalisms” project understood caring (not necessarily or exclusively by women or mothers) as a profoundly generative and significant activity that is itself a form of art. As Kotak and Loveless demonstrated, perhaps taking influence from such feminist artists of the 1970s as Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Mary Kelly, it is not necessary to “do more.” Mothering is already creative.
View of Marni Kotak’s installation “The Birth of Baby X,” 2011, at Microscope Gallery, New York.
Courtesy Microscope Gallery, New York
The Fondazione Nicola Trussardi’s 2015 survey, “The Great Mother,” was, as its name suggests, more concerned with the objective or objectified figure of mother. Its curator, Massimiliano Gioni, may have derived some inspiration from Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that “it was as Mother that woman was fearsome; it is in maternity that she must be transfigured and enslaved” in designing this ambivalent look at the power of maternity. Notably inflected by the work of Surrealist artists who sometimes swore off pregnancy altogether (Meret Oppenheim) or saw it as a form of machinelike productivity (almost all male Surrealists), the show was designed to compare images of motherhood across time and varying social conditions. As Gioni wrote in a catalog essay, “Analyzing the representation of motherhood therefore means asking first and foremost who has the right to make decisions regarding bodies and desires, and who has the right to represent them.” While this invocation of questions related to reproductive justice might on the surface seem like a promising starting point, it tended to turn the focus of the exhibition toward the exigencies and restrictions of fathers and governments, rather than permitting the art to speak for itself, as in Kotak and Loveless’s explorations.
View of the exhibition “Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births‚” 2025–26, at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York.
Photo Jenna Bascom/Courtesy Museum of Arts and Design, New York
THE 2020s HAVE SEEN a new focus on the artist as a mother whose practice is apparently enriched by her experience of being a parent. This may have something to do with the way in which the Covid pandemic laid bare the West’s deprioritization of care. After all, emotional abandonment was among the pandemic’s many widespread negative effects. Each pod, or maybe each person, was on their own, an island, with the exception of the protests in the summer of 2020, when masses gathered in the streets for Black Lives Matter. Take care were the watchwords on everyone’s pixelated lips, broadcast with varying degrees of clarity via Zoom. Take care of yourself—if you can.
In 2021 a wildly successful Alice Neel retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—including portraits of pregnant people, families, and children—placed mothering and care at the center of this artist’s story.Neel was the mother of four and deeply concerned with how everyday life was created and sustained by the people around her. Her thick-lined portraits reflect a form of concern that might be maternal in nature and that tends to revise our concept of artistic mastery, rendering it warmer, more casual and personal. It is likely no accident that the show was popular, coming as it did on the heels of the social deprivation of lockdown. Its humor and general air of kindness and inclusivity suggested that the domestic sphere, which had been a confining space for many people at this time, could paradoxically contain multitudes and be expansive even in its familiarity.
Subsequent retrospectives with related goals include the Neue Galerie’s 2024 Paula Modersohn-Becker survey, the Museum of Modern Art’s 2024 Käthe Kollwitz exhibition, and the same institution’s forthcoming Ruth Asawa and Helen Frankenthaler shows (worth noting that Frankenthaler was the stepmother of two), as well as the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s recent “Mary Cassatt: At Work.” These initiatives suggest that institutions are becoming more conscious of the broad interest inherent to the practices of artists who found ways to incorporate domestic labor into their artmaking and vice versa. A traveling exhibition organized by the Hayward Gallery, “Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood,” on view until 2026 at the Southbank Centre, London, updates this focus by surveying more contemporary work, including that by painter Tala Madani, whose “Shit Moms” (2019–) series is a brilliant send-up of the ongoing misogynist denigration of care work.
View of the exhibition “Good Mom/Bad Mom: Unraveling the Mother Myth,” 2025, at Centraal Museum, Utrecht.
Photo Gert Jan van Rooij/Courtesy Centraal Museum, Utrecht
A separate series of more critical exhibitions also center themes of pregnancy and motherhood, but attempt to use these themes to raise broader social and political questions. These include “Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media” (2020) at the Foundling Museum in London, “Labor: Motherhood & Art”(2020) at the New Mexico State University Art Museum, “A Perfect Power: Motherhood and African Art” (2020) at the Baltimore Museum of Art, “Picturing Motherhood Now”(2021) at the Cleveland Museum of Art, “Good Mom/Bad Mom: Unraveling the Mother Myth” (2025) at Centraal Museum in Utrecht, and “Designing Motherhood: A Century of Making (and Unmaking) Babies” (2021) at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia and opening at the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan this fall.Each of these forward-thinking presentations of artworks and design objects has urged visitors to consider the agency of birthing and parenting people as models for human society more generally.
These shows were concerned with grieving the difficulties and losses associated with birth and motherhood, as well as with describing the aspects of care that surpass restrictions of law and convention. They also sought to broaden the concept of mothering, following scholar and critic Hortense Spillers’s thought, to be a practice that all can participate in regardless of gender, sex, or biological relationship. Complex and challenging in the best ways, these exhibitions suggest how museums can support conversations around pressing social issues such as the medicalization of birth, immigration policy and the practice of family separation, and racism and ableism within care systems. “Picturing Motherhood Now” was particularly innovative in this respect, including such current work as Jacolby Satterwhite’s collaborations with his mother in which together they explore her experience of making art about schizophrenia.
Tala Madani: Shit Mom (The Streakers), 2019.
From top: Photo Flying Studio/Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles and New York
AS INTRIGUING as these exhibitions are, recent publications may even surpass them in interest. MIT Press has recently published an array of books about the politics of mothering, reproductive health, and media and design in relation to parenting. The finest among these is perhaps the catalog for Designing Motherhood, edited by Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, a beautifully designed book that incorporates astonishing images from the weird and sometimes disturbing history of the engineering of objects, drugs, garments, and material and social structures designed to support and control maternal bodies. These include such dubious products as anti-radiation clothing, postpartum mesh underwear, and Carefree Panty Shields, as well as wonders like birthing furniture and Grace Jones’s 1979 constructivist maternity dress designed by Antonio Lopez. If you read one book about parenting and birth this year, this should be it.
I have additionally been drawn to the innovative publications of Thick Press. This experimental press, founded by a social worker and a graphic designer, has been putting out a cornucopia of pamphlets and anthologies making brilliant use of inexpensive materials and addressing the scarcity of care in the contemporary United States in a head-on fashion. Thick Press’s recent An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping is a masterpiece, with A to Z entries on topics in mental health and community-building, as well as artistic practice: A is for “abundance,” “Afrofuturism,” “aging positivity,” “art therapy,” and more, while B is for “being with,” “bike and car repair collectives,” “boredom,” and “breaking the rules.” Like the critical exhibitions listed above, it points toward new ways of combining aesthetics and practice to shore up our worlds in a time of crisis.
As the US has become the least safe place to give birth in the industrialized world, as Black parents face outsize risks in pregnancy and birth (see LaToya Ruby Frazier’s extraordinary documentary photographs for the 2018 New York Times Magazine feature by Linda Villarosa, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis”), as child separation becomes a norm at our borders, some might wish to retreat into private life or minimize these harms by treating them as issues for women or, failing that, “someone else.” It’s easy to want to turn away from these facts and events and continue to think of motherhood as a sort of sacred sphere.
But if you ask me, a person who has given birth and is raising a child, there’s nothing that special about being a mom. Sorry if this assertion offends you. Alas, I must stand by it. All the things you might expect about motherhood are true for me: I love my child, I’ve sacrificed my body and professional life on behalf of my child, I’d gladly do this all again. Contrary to majority experience, I’m even happier being a parent than I was beforehand. In a very limited sense, I’m a pro-natalist poster child and potential trad wife myself. But I can’t pretend there is anything all that special about this, and the reason I can’t is because I know there is nothing natural about the social and political conditions that elevate my relationship with my child above all other relationships I may have in my life—and that simultaneously hold me responsible for preserving and educating my child in ways that no other person, including my child’s father, is held responsible. I am aware that there is a long-standing American tradition of forcing people to care. This understanding that people can be forced to care is, tragically, a foundational aspect of our country. And it seems we are not planning to revise this original tenet in 2025.
So for me, mothering opens a form of historical understanding which is, to be frank, a form of grief. It also causes me to ask questions about the present. Why is there no place for me to rest when I am carrying a child through an American city? Why is childcare so scarce? Why was I advised (I refused) to give birth on my back? Art about mothers and mothering is at its best when it acknowledges ambiguity and ambivalence. This is no easy feat, for how do you simultaneously represent the joy a person may feel that care can be given freely and the terror a person can feel that care is given freely, the terrifying vulnerability of the need to care? How do you show the alarming, exhausting, and frustrating need to support survival, alongside the joy of seeing a child thrive? The artists Louise Bourgeois and Kara Walker are two of those who best portray the heady combination of ecstasy and horror that can accompany mothering, to give you some sense of what I mean. As the best interdisciplinary work is showing, understanding mothering in our time is key to understanding the vulnerabilities of our freedoms. Mothering is not only “of” its time. It may be always ahead of its time as well.
