Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break our Births

Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break our Births is a multifaceted project that explores human reproduction through our material cultures. Organized collaboratively by Juliana Rowen Barton, Zoe Gregg, Michelle Millar Fisher, Gabriella Nelson, and Amber Winick, it began as an award-winning book published through MIT Press, and evolved to include a design curriculum, a website, and an exhibition traveling from Philadelphia to Boston, then Seattle and Stockholm. I was excited to catch it at Boston’s MassArt Museum of Art (MAAM), where it's on view through December 18th.

Designing Motherhood is a complex show that can appear deceptively straightforward. The layout is clean with minimal wall text, and many items on display will seem familiar at first to those who’ve experienced the ups and downs of having a uterus. As I wandered through I nodded in recognition at an array of delicate, curiously shaped IUDs, early tampon designs, and a selection of baby carriers used around the world. But among these were quite a few things I couldn’t identify. Consulting the exhibition guide I discovered critical tools I'd never heard of, many designed to address inevitable flaws in a birthing industry where men predominate. The accompanying texts unfurl narratives of struggle, innovation, love and empowerment.

prototypes for a discreet, flushable pregnancy test
designed by Bethany Edwards and Anna Couturier
Simpson, and a tactile pregnancy test for the blind
designed by Josh Wasserman

During my visit, a college class arrived for a tour with co-curator Michelle Millar Fischer, who led the group towards an unpleasant-looking surgical device designed by J. Marion Sims, the so-called "father of modern gynecology." She explained that though it is commonly known as the Sims Instrument, the tool is also labeled here as "Lucy," the name used by Ob/Gyn Kameelah Phillips and her surgical team to shift recognition to one of the enslaved black women on whom it was first tested. We moved on to a silicone speculum now under development by a four-woman team, and a guide created by disabled members of San Francisco's Planned Parenthood to make pelvic exams less painful and more accessible for a variety of bodies. This approach exemplifies the tone of the exhibition: it spotlights designs that support reproductive sovereignty, solidarity, and care across a spectrum of cultural, disability, gender identities - without shying away from the patriarchal history of obstetrics and gynecology.  As the show travels, it incorporates local resource guides that include feminist healthcare collectives, counseling centers, and other systems of support.

a necklace with color-coded beads to track ovulation, 
designed with a group led by Dr. Maria Hengstberger

In Designing Motherhood, design and activism are often interchangeable, and community organizing stands out as a critical form of care. There are flushable pregnancy tests for those in precarious situations, and home abortion kits made from easy-to-find objects, created in 1971 by the Los Angeles Self Help Clinic. Documentation of the MIT Media Lab’s “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” Hackathon plays on a monitor alongside those standard pump models that keep surprising new moms with their poor design, and a video by artist Arrow (aka Ari Fitz) explores maternity wear from the perspective of a queer masculine pregnant person of color. 

Numerous products used in women's health care haven't been updated much since their invention, something Designing Motherhood aims to change. In its Philadelphia iteration, its curators collaborated with UPenn professor Orkan Telhan to develop an open source curriculum for art and design classes, introducing the challenges and inequities mothers encounter as series of creative prompts. In Boston, the show is hosted by MAAM, a teaching museum linked to the city’s public college of art and design. During my visit, a student gestured her group over to inspect an irregular grid of blue and red rectangles by Ani Liu. It was a chart tracking the time of every feeding, pumping, and diaper change during the first 30 days of her child's life. It's a form of data-collection that pediatricians urge many mothers to undertake, and I remembered the process all too well. Even so, it is striking to see a single graphic that captures the extreme, round-the-clock fracturing of time that takes place in early parenthood, during which Liu was granted no maternity leave. I try to imagine what the next generation might make of this information, and what it could mean for the future. 

The exhibition will travel on to Seattle in 2023, and then on to Stockholm, Sweden. No matter where you are, the Designing Motherhood book is well worth seeking out. It is not an exhibition catalogue but a thick, beautifully-designed collection packed with essays, interviews, and images that extends beyond the scope of the show. You can also find designed objects, international policies and more by following their ongoing IG account @designingmotherhood. 

Ani Liu's "Untitled (Labor of Love)," charting the first 30 days of her child's life

Mothernism: An Interview with Lise Haller Baggesen

Lise Haller Baggesen left her native Denmark for the Netherlands in 1992 to study painting at the AKI and the Rijksakademie. In 2008 she relocated to Chicago with her family, where she completed her MA in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In the meantime, her work evolved from a traditional painting practice toward a hybrid practice that includes curating, writing, and installation work. Her ongoing transdisciplinary project Mothernism (2013-) stakes out the mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse through writing and installation that radically reframes the language of the mother-artist. The project includes a 152-page book expanding conversations about intergenerational feminism, art, career, and politics, with essays that double as personal letters from an artist to her daughter, sister, and mother.  Embodying this work is Haller Baggesen’s nomadic audio installation camp, complete with tent, library, and revisionist protest banners that reference both color field painting and feminist slogans. 

Mothernism has toured Europe and the US extensively, including exhibitions at London South Bank University (UK), Upominki (NL), Vox Populi (PA) The Elmhurst Art Museum Biennial (IL), The Elizabeth Foundation (NY), A.I.R. Gallery (NY), and a solo project for The Contemporary Austin (TX), where it’s currently on view through May 22nd. We caught up with Lise as she wraps up a new body of work for her solo exhibition HATORADE RETROGRADE, which debuts at Chicago’s Threewalls from May 6th through June 11th, 2016.

Cultural ReProducers: So Lise, could you briefly describe your kids?

Lise: My son Adam (16) is a super mellow, gentle, human being. Even as a small child, when I was getting in a tiff over something, he would take my hand and pat it and go “There, there, Mom. This too will pass.” I have learned a tremendous amount about patience, compassion, and endurance from him, if only by osmosis. His favorite subject is physics, which also just demonstrates how entirely different he is from me.

My daughter Eleanor (10) on the other hand, is so like myself it sometimes seems like she was born from immaculate conception. She is whip-smart, precocious even, and she will tell you what is on her mind. Her favorite subject is art, and she wants to be an author. They are both competing slam poets, which is a lot of fun and also puts their combined talents to good use. 

  

CR: You grew up in Denmark and then relocated to the Netherlands to study art. Both countries provide generous paid family leave and affordable childcare for their citizens, whereas in the United States… well, here we have nothing even approaching that level of support. What was the transition like when you moved to the US? Do you notice broader implications within the culture of motherhood?

Lise: Both my kids were born in Amsterdam. In the Netherlands there is (still) quite an ingrained “motherhood cult” and mothers are generally expected to stay home until their kids start school at age four, and also to be around to pick school-going kids up for lunch at home and such. As a result, a lot of Dutch women work part time. It was something I frowned upon at the time, but not so much now, as I am getting more critical of the neo-liberal notions of “lean in feminism,” for women –and men—to be at the disposal of the work market at all times.

However, when I became pregnant with Adam, I had just finished a two-year residency the Rijksakademie, which has a highly competitive and professional environment. I did not count many parent-artists among my friends, and I, too, bought into the idea of child-rearing being at odds with a creative practice, so I sent my own kids to child care from pretty early on (about 9 months).  There was not much economic reasoning behind this but I really wanted to get back in the studio, and my painting practice at the time was not entirely child proof. 

too often are mothers expected to check in their motherhood at the door and instead don some kind of “male drag” to be granted re-entry to the arty-smarty-party of art and academia.  

 

Coming to the United States wasn’t much of a culture shock in that regard – but it did take me a while to find traction with my work here, as you (still) don’t meet many artists hanging around the playground after school. Being at home with my children (again) during this transition reminded me of ways that spending time with them was not only a hindrance, but also an inspiration with regards to my creative practice. It was something I had started touching on in the Netherlands, where it had not been entirely positively received – but which reconfigured itself over here through writing etc. It must be said that this didn’t happen overnight, though; it wasn’t really until I went back to school –initially with the intent of shaking myself of the “mother-artist syndrome” –that I fully realized how profoundly the child rearing and care work I had been engaged in the previous decade had changed not only my practice, but also my critical thinking related to it. That realization was the impetus for writing Mothernism, which originated as my MA thesis in Visual and Critical Studies.

 

CR: In Mothernism, you argue that regardless of childcare, studio time, etc. nothing will really change for mothers in the arts until we reframe how motherhood is perceived, inserting ourselves both within and in opposition to the canon of art history.  This is an important idea, and it’s no simple task. Do you have any thoughts on how more mother artists might take up this charge?

Lise: The art world – as I’m sure you’ve noticed if you’ve hung around in it for longer than a minute — is not always as forward thinking as it would like to think itself to be. Despite its obsession with “the shock of the new” some pretty old-fashioned notions on creativity are still doing the rounds in contemporary arts education, for example. It’s all very Freudian and tied to the idea of creativity as sublimation, Lacan’s idea of the gaze etc. While enrolled in the MA program in Visual and Critical Studies (VCS) at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago I became aware of psychoanalytical theories by people like Lou Andreas-Salomé, Bracha Ettinger, and Melanie Klein, who linked the creative impulse to what has been coined a “non-pathological narcissism;” a reparative state connected with prenatal and early mother-infant relations and bonding.

As you suggest, to make that paradigm shift is no easy task: matrophobia (which means not only fear of mothers, but also fear of becoming like your mother) is rampant in the art world. Like other forms of (self) oppression – such as racism, sexism, homophobia etc — it is both institutionalized and internalized to the point of becoming invisible.  It passes under the radar, and is perpetuated in particular by those most likely to be affected – in this case female artists.

As a mother/artist you are expected to get “back to normal” as soon as possible after childbirth – disregarding that this entirely transformative experience you have just gone through with your body, and your mind, is also entirely normal. Way too often are mothers expected to check in their motherhood at the door and instead don some kind of “male drag” to be granted re-entry to the arty-smarty-party of art and academia. While identity politics have been crucial to the art and academic debate since the culture wars of the eighties, and various sexual and demographic groups are represented way better than just a decade ago – and considering what this plurality of voices has brought to the table in terms of form, content and context—I think not only mothers but also others could benefit from the maternal voice being heard. It is astounding to witness the degree to which pregnancy, childbirth, and care work, is trivialized as sentimental and unworthy as subject matters (or at best: as women’s matters) in the arts, literature, philosophy etc. –something Julia Kristeva touches on in her inquiry “is there a female genius?” and her statement that “we need a new philosophy of motherhood.” I am perhaps not suggesting that everybody need to journal “baby’s first year” by way of an art project –although Mary Kelly has done that to great and minimalist effect in Post-Partum Document — but that your art may benefit from this new vantage point from which you now may view the world.

But wait, this was all about “why” should we take up this change, and you were asking “how” …okay so, first we need better childcare, and studio time, and a fifty/fifty division of labor, and gallery representation… no wait… okay so, I think one thing to keep in mind is to be unafraid of ghettoization, by which I mean that the art world has become obsessed with the mainstream since the turn of the millennium; whereas in the seventies they would build a Woman House and get on with it, we are now debating “are all-woman-shows good or bad for art?” But, what is this “art” of which you speak? Changes in the conversation will happen on the fringes before they reach the center, and nobody is a more deserving (or receptive) audience than the people in a similar situation to your own.

I think it is important to pick your battles, and to keep asking yourself: where do I want to go with this? Who do I want to reach? Would the next stop on the Mothernism Tour be a Mothernist Base Camp at Art Basel? Now, Art Basel, if you are reading this, I would totally Mothernize the hell out of you! But would it be the end game of Mothernism? I don’t think so.

Which brings me back to why and how I wrote Mothernism. “Why?” is because I became increasingly frustrated that in this environment that was the VCS department, where we were talking art theory, queer theory, feminist theory, intersectional feminism, body politics, etc. I found little willingness to consider my experience of mothering, and how it had affected my view on these matters. I felt like I was being sent “back to the Mommy-blog” with my musings –like it wasn’t academic material. So I thought alright, if nobody in this room wants to have this conversation, then I will make it the subject of my thesis, and then we will have this conversation! But, (and this is the “How?”) since I was still convinced at this point that nobody in- or out-side of that room wanted to hear about it, I just wrote it to impress a handful of people, including my three thesis advisors and some future version of my daughter (the fifth being myself, I suppose)… I was really taken aback when Michelle Grabner offered to publish it, and again when Caroline Picard got onboard and offered to help editing it, and again when so many people (mothers and non-mothers) wanted to read it. I had never imagined it would find the audience it did. But then again, if you choose wisely the first few people you want to impress, that will set the bar high enough. So I actually never doubted that the book was “good enough” once it was out in the world.

CR: You taught a course at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago based on Mothernism that I’ve been dying to ask you about. SAIC isn’t exactly teeming with young parents. Were there mothers in the class? How did you go about framing this content for a population for whom motherhood is an abstraction?

Lise: No, I had no mothers in my class, but as I had written in my “elevator pitch,” you don’t need to be a mother to take this class, but it helps to have one. Riffing off of what I just said, Mothernism at its core touches on new ways of understanding the creative practice –and through that, a fundamental institutional critique. You don’t have to be a mother to sympathize with that. 

One another level, the term Mothernism relates directly to both modernism and feminism –both of which I understand as positive connotations—but could also imply negative associations along the lines of sexism, ageism and abled-body-ism; a certain “othering” projected at the maternal body/mind, which I have certainly felt on my own body, but could equally well be experienced by a colored body, a trans body, a queer body and so on. These are not abstractions, but directly felt and lived realities, which we navigate on the daily.

I have to say that although there were both generational and cultural divides to be bridged, my students went all the way in and responded to my ideas and the primary text with I shared with them, with amazing work and challenging critical thinking and writing. I am very grateful to have worked with them and I hope they feel the same way –it was a leap of faith from both sides, but well worth it.

CR: For the past few years your Mothernism project has continued to evolve as it tours the world. In the meantime I know you’ve been hard at work on a new series. What has been happening in the studio?  

Lise: Yes, Mothernism is touring and is currently up at The Contemporary Austin (TX). For this iteration of the show, the museum commissioned a new work from me, namely The Mothernist’s Audio Guide to Laguna Gloria. It is a glorious walk in the park, during which I talk about the sculptures on the grounds and the history of the site in relation to (art) history, personal anecdote and (pop) cultural lore. It is very much about regarding the art of (m)others in this particular point in space and time –something I keep returning to in my writing. I was a very rewarding experience to get to do this in collaboration with a team of museum staff, who helped me research their collections, and something I would love to do again in the future.

In May Mothernism will travel to Canada for the exhibition and colloquium New Maternalisms Redux / Mapping the Maternal  organized by Natalie Loveless at the University of Alberta. I will be the visiting artist for the symposium, which means that I will get to hang out in my installation with some of my most favorite (and some of the most brilliant) mother-minds in the world—something I am obviously thrilled about.

Here in Chicago I am cramming in a few more weeks before my solo show opening at Threewalls in early May. The show is called HATORADE RETROGRADE, and as the title implies it is somewhat darker and more dystopian than Mothernism. I see it as my “Coming to America” show and it is a sartorial and satirical vision of the US anno 2033, where everything is covered in glittery pollution. It is very much related to my experience of American material culture, and it is as American as tie-dye, but is also revisionist view of a European avant-garde, seen trough an American vernacular.

The upcoming show consists of a collection of costumes against a backdrop of “lipstick formalist” revisionism – paintings inspired by female avant-gardist Sonia Delaunay, and her retrospective, which you and I saw together when we were in London. What I really loved about that show was how entirely un-hierarchically artistic and fashion production was presented, with her paintings, costumes, and textiles completely level pecking. A lovely baby blanket is credited as her first “abstract” work, for example. It reminded me how much I always enjoy a good costume in a museum setting, but also of my love of dressing up, which was one of my favorite games as a kid, and still to this day. I found it very stimulating to see how the costumes and paintings engaged in a figure/ground relation, so I really wanted some of that in my next show.

This new body of work relates directly to Mothernism, as it is the third installment in a trilogy on female genius (the first being So Deep in Your Room, You Never Leave Your Room, an allegory on studio practice from 2012), but instead of speaking in an internal voice (So Deep in Your Room), or in a direct 1st person address (Mothernism), HATORADE RETROGRADE speaks in a cachophony of voices, for which I have commissioned an all female cast of poets, writers, and artists to write the audio for the show.

CR: You reference so many important mother-artists through your work. If you had to pick just a few, who has most deeply impacted your approach to combining parenthood with creative practice?

Lise: It may sound weird, but that is not something I think about a lot. When I think about my own artistic heroes, I don’t think about them so much as being great mothers, as being great whores. In the essay Mother of Pearl I asked the question “if all our heroes are whores, maybe whoring is heroic?” But I also lash out at Simone de Beauvoir and her truism that “housewives are prostitutes” with a “Don’t Ho Me If You Don’t Know me, Simone!”

In other words: the people who inspire me are often folks who “do whatever you gotta do, in order to do what you gotta do.” Some of the people I mention in the book, like Louise Bourgeois and Niki de Saint-Phalle are probably not the finest examples of how to reconcile mothering and art making in an inspiring way… but then again: the book was never intended as a manual for how to combine a mother/artist practice and make the best of both worlds.

Looking a little closer to home, of course there are people who have inspired me: my thesis advisors Michelle Grabner and Romi Crawford are the first who come to mind. In the world of pop, I like how Yoko Ono performs with her son on stage, or how Björk defends hers against the paparazzi. I like it when Kate Bush makes a comeback album on which she sings about washing machines and her loverly-loverly Bertie, or how Patti Smith, when asked by an interviewer how it feels to come back to the stage after more than a decade of “doing nothing” answers “Nothing? What do you mean, nothing? I was raising my kids and writing poetry, that is not nothing!”

Lise Haller Baggesen inside Mothernism

Cultural ReProducers in NYC and Chicago - join us this week!

We have been quietly busy working on some exciting projects in Chicago and New York, and here’s news on a few that are coming up soon. We'd love to see you there.

Who's Holding the Baby? the Hackney Flashers, 1978

WAH-WAH, SHH, CHOMP, MUNCH, NOM, BURP, POOT, SLURP, YUM, TOOT, MWAH. BUT WHO’S HOLDING THE BABY?
EFA Project Space
323 w 39th Street #3, New York, NY
Saturday, Jan 27, 3 - 5:30 PM

If you’re in or near New York you’re invited to participate in an open forum with Christa Donner from Cultural ReProducers, Maiko Tanaka from The Grand Domestic Revolution, Marisa Jahn from The CareForce, and artist Jacqueline Hoang Nguyen for Wah-wah, shh, chomp, munch, nom, burp, poot, slurp, yum, toot, mwah. But who's holding the baby?

This open forum explores the intersection of cultural work, arts institutions, and caring labor. …But Who’s Holding the Baby? is presented in conjunction with the exhibition "The Let Down Reflex", curated by Amber Berson and Juliana Driever, at EFA Project Space in Manhattan. Come join the conversation on February 27th between 3:00-5:30pm.
Free childcare will be available.

ART + FEMINISM WIKIPEDIA EDIT-A-THON


School of the Art Institute of Chicago

37 S. Wabash, 1st Floor Neiman Center
, Chicago, IL
Saturday, March 5, 
drop in between 12 pm - 5 pm

Why are some of the most important mamas in art and design missing from Wikipedia? Well, because you haven’t added them yet. Cultural ReProducers is pleased to team up with Art+Feminism and Tracers to participate in the Chicago 2016 Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, and we need your help to expand its content and scope.

Everyone's welcome, and you need not have any previous Wikipedia editing know-how to take part: facilitators will offer 10-minute training sessions every hour on the hour and offer individual support as needed. Library staff will offer resources. Free childcare is in the works... get in touch if you can use it!

So: mark your calendars, pack up the kids, and please bring a laptop and a photo ID (for building access). To make the most of your time at the event, we recommend you create an account before you arrive. For more information, check out the Chicago meetup page.

Save the Dates: Motherhood + Art Panels Galore!

The intersection of motherhood and art seems to be on a lot of people's minds these days, and it's the subject of a whole slew of amazing (and all FREE) public panels exploring career, art practice, feminism, and motherhood taking place this February in Chicago. Christa Donner will discuss Cultural ReProducers on two separate panels, along with a lot of incredibly inspiring artists, curators, historians and critics. We hope to see some of you at these events, and look forward to future conversations online and in person.

Friday, February 14th, 10am - 5pm (MOTHERHOOD from 1-3pm)
TRACERS TAKES ON FEMINISM: LGBTQ, MOTHERHOOD, AND RACE
ThreeWalls / 119 N. Peoria / 2C / Chicago, IL

This Valentine's Day, grab your sweeheart and take the day to take in three panels on three topics hosted by the feminist book club TRACERS at ThreeWalls (As an added bonus, you can check out the amazing Faith Wilding retrospective while you're there).

MOTHERHOOD Panelists include Lorelei Stewart (moderator), Christa Donner
, Brittany Southworth Laflamme
, Judy Ledgerwood
, Laura Letinsky
, Romi Crawford
, Julie Rodrigues Widholm
, and Christine Tarkowski.

for information on the full day of events, visit the headline link above!

Saturday, February 15th, 9am - 5pm
THE 'M' WORD:  THE FEMINIST ART PROJECT DAY OF PANELS AT THE CAA

Columbia College Chicago / Stage Two / 618 S. Michigan Ave / 2nd floor, Chicago, IL

This year, The Feminist Art Project presents an entire DAY of panels at the annual College Art Association (CAA) Conference, exploring the representation of the maternal in art and visual culture. Topics of discussion include art historical readings of maternity, the maternal body, exhibitions that address maternity/motherhood, collaboration with children, and what it means to be a mother and an artist today in relationship to the issue of M/E/A/N/I/N/G on artists/mothers! Cultural ReProducers will participate in the panel on Exhibitionary / Curatorial practice.

Below is a brief rundown of the day's events. For panelists and more detailed information, check out the TCAF Day of Panels site. Note: The following panels are free and open to the public. You do NOT have to be a member of the CAA or registered for the conference to attend.

9:10-10:30am
Historical Perspectives on Representing the Maternal
Building upon burgeoning scholarship such as Rachel Epp Buller's anthology Reconciling Art and Motherhood, Myrel Chernick's and Jennie Klein's The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art, and the work of the MaMSIE (Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics) network, this panel presents historical perspectives on maternal subject positions and the depiction of maternal imagery.

10:40 am-12pm
Motherhood and the Exhibitionary Platform: Considering the Implications of Maternity Through the Curatorial Lens
This session will address exhibitions that have been premised upon the idea of motherhood and the maternal, within the broader context of feminism and the history and theory of exhibition making. In addition to considering the curatorial role itself through a "curator as maternalist" paradigm, presentations will reflect various curatorial methodologies from traditional museum scale exhibitions to hybrid or itinerant curatorial projects that engage various forms of social space, including the home. By bringing together various critical feminist positions alongside divergent curatorial strategies the goal of this session is to chart an evolution of practice via exemplary models for thinking and doing.

12:40-2pm
From Sentiment to Sexuality: Revisiting the Maternal Body as Threat
This panel revisits the "threat" of the maternal body, both in practice and theory. Amongst other topics, papers will address the historical rejection of sentimentality by feminist artist mothers, the sexuality of the mother-child relationship, non-reproductive and non-heteronormative maternal bodies, and the changing perspectives on essentialism and the female/maternal body today.

2:10-3:30pm
Mothers / Artists / Children
What are the implications when an artist brings her children into her work? Where is the line between collaboration and exploitation? When can children give consent, or even be considered artists in their own right? This panel addresses twentieth-century and contemporary incarnations of the often-controversial mother / artist / child triangle.

3:40-5pm
Revisiting M/E/A/N/I/N/G #12
In 1992, Susan Bee and Mira Schor, editors of the art journal M/E/A/N/I/N/G, published FORUM: ON MOTHERHOOD, ART, AND APPLE PIE. They invited a group of artist/mothers to respond to a series of questions about their artistic careers and lives as mothers. Although none of the women regretted becoming mothers, most of them talked about their difficult choices, and how they maintained a strict separation between family and studio practice. Twenty years later, we believe we are seeing many more women who are interested in integrating their familial and artistic lives. After a short statement from Susan Bee, five artists respond to the M/E/A/N/I/N/G issue in relationship to their lives and work now.

..........................................................................................

For those of you not in Chicago this February, we'll post any video/audio online as soon as we can get our hands on it. In the meantime, you can read/watch/listen to these great panels on the topic:

Colloquy: Parenthood in the Art World (MOCA Los Angeles, 2013)
Taking Custody: The Double Life of the Artist Mother (Pratt, NYC, 2012)
Forum: On Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie M/E/A/N/I/N/G #12 (1992)

Artist-Mamas You Didn't Know You Knew

One of the daunting things about motherhood for many of us is that there seem to be so few examples of successful women artists and writers with children. In fact, there may be far more than you think. Acknowledging the tricky nature of defining "success", it still seems relevant to compile a running list of widely-recognized female artists and writers who achieved acclaim while also raising one or more children. This list is by no means comprehensive -- corrections or notable additions are welcome! 

Shirin Neshat; Untitled (Mother and Child)

Rita Ackerman

Mequitta Ahuja
Diana Al-Hadid

Isabel Allende
Candida Alvarez
Janine Antoni
Ida Applebroog (4 children and the Macarthur Grant)

Diane Arbus

Ruth Asawa (6 children)
Margaret Atwood

Phyllida Barlow (5 children)

Vanessa Beecroft

Hilla Becher

Aisha Bell
Anonda Bell

Amy Bennet

Barbara Bloom

Monica Bock

Lee Bontecou

Louise Bourgeois (3 children)

Carol Bove

Gwendolyn Brooks

Cecily Brown

Joan Brown

Sharon Butler

Ingrid Calame 
Jane Campion
Janet Cardiff

Leanora Carrington

Sarah Charlesworth

Nicole Cherubini

Lauri de Chira

Susan Choi

Carmela Ciuraru

Lygia Clarke

Colette

Sophia Coppola

Sara Crowner

Melissa Dadourian

Jennifer Dalton

Katherine Daniels

Nancy Davidson

Lisa Corinne Davis

Sonia Delaunay

Joan Didion

Cheryl Donegan

Marlene Dumas

Artemisia Gentileschi

Mary Gordon

Kim Gordon
Michelle Grabner

Nicole Eisenman

Nora Ephron

Louise Erdrich (6 children)
Valie Export

Rachel Feinstein

Jane Fine

Kim Fisher

Jenny Saville

Pamela Fraser

Coco Fusco

Ann Hamilton

Grace Hartigan

Libby Hartl

Ellen Harvey
Kirsten Hassenfield

Rachel Hayes

Julie Heffernan

Barbara Hepworth (4 children)

Dana Hoey

Lisa Hoke

Jenny Holzer

Henriette Hulich

Jessica Hutchins

Yvonne Jacquette

Elisa Jensen

Natalie Jeremijenko (3 children)

Miranda July
Peggy Kaplan

Mary Kelly

Margaret Kilgallen

Barbara Kingsolver

Jamaica Kincaid

Sylvia Kolbowski

Kathe Kollwitz

Julia Kristeva

Maxine Kumin

Jhumpa Lahiri

Anne Lamott

Ellen Lanyon

Dorianne Laux

Louise Lawler

Judy Ledgerwood 
Annie Leibovitz
Simone Leigh

Laura Letinsky

Denise Levertov

Nina Levy
Maya Lin

Joan Linder

Sally Mann (3 children)

Gina Magid

Shawne Major

Tanya Marcuse
Caitlin Masley

Joyce Maynard

Myrium Mechita

Julie Mehretu

Jessica Mein

Wangechi Mutu (from her interview in Mater Mea)

Maggie Michaels

Berthe Morisot

Natalie Moore

Kristine Moran

Toni Morrison

Alice Munro

Ellie Murphy

Elizabeth Murray (3 children)
Wangechi Mutu

Amy Myers (baby at 43)
Nancy Meyers

Mira Nair

Alice Neel
Senga Nengudi

Louise Nevelson

Shirin Neshat

Alice Notley

Yoko Ono
Catherine Opie

Laura Owens

Lygia Pape

Laura Parnes

Chloe Piene

Danica Phelps

Sylvia Plachy

Sylvia Plath

Monique Prieto (3 children)

Annie Proulx (4 children)

Ana Prvacki
Jessica Rankin

Jennifer Reeder (3 children)
Adrienne Rich 
Faith Ringgold

Andrea Robbins

Roxana Robinson

Dorothea Rockburne

Ruth Root

Aura Rosenberg

Martha Rosler

Ellen Rothenberg
Mary Shelley (wrote Frankenstein as a pregnant teenager)

Bettye Saar

Sappho

Jenny Saville

Anne Sexton

Katie Schimert

Jean Shin

Lisa Sigel (3 children)

Susan Silas

Laurie SImmons

Lorna Simpson 
Patti Smith

Zadie Smith 
Susan Sontag

Nancy Spero (3 children, 6 grandchildren)

Gael Stack

Olja Stipanovic

Jessica Stockholder

Julianne Swartz

Sarah Sze

Dannielle Tegeder

Austin Thomas

Yoko Ono with Sean Lennon

Elizabeth Tremante

Anne Truitt (3 children, 8 grandchildren)

Lorena Turner

Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Sarah Vanderlip

Ayelet Waldman

Alice Walker

Kara Walker

Carrie Mae Weems
Gina Werfel

Rachel Whiteread

Wendy White

Mary Wollstonecraft

Sara Wooster

Jennifer Wrobleski

Andrea Zittel