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.
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.
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.
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.
As compelling as these exhibitions may be, recent publications arguably surpass them in depth and urgency. MIT Press has released a notable collection of books examining the politics of mothering, reproductive health, and the intersections of media, design, and parenting. Among the strongest is the catalog for Designing Motherhood, edited by Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick. Beautifully produced, the book features striking imagery drawn from the strange—and at times unsettling—history of objects, medications, garments, and social systems created to both support and regulate maternal bodies. Its pages document questionable inventions such as anti-radiation clothing, postpartum mesh underwear, and Carefree Panty Shields, alongside remarkable designs like birthing furniture and Grace Jones’s 1979 constructivist maternity dress by Antonio Lopez. If there is one book on parenting and birth worth reading this year, this is it.
I have also found myself drawn to the inventive output of Thick Press. Founded by a social worker and a graphic designer, this experimental press produces an abundance of pamphlets and anthologies that creatively use low-cost materials to confront the widespread lack of care in contemporary America. One standout is An Encyclopedia of Radical Helping, a remarkable A-to-Z compilation addressing mental health, community-building, and artistic practice. Entries range from “abundance,” “Afrofuturism,” and “aging positivity” to “being with,” “bike and car repair collectives,” “boredom,” and “breaking the rules.” Like the exhibitions mentioned earlier, it gestures toward new ways of merging aesthetics with practice to sustain our shared worlds in a time of crisis.
At a moment when the United States has become the most dangerous place to give birth in the industrialized world, when Black parents face disproportionately high risks during pregnancy and childbirth, and when child separation at the border has become routine, it is tempting to retreat into private life or dismiss these realities as issues that belong to women—or, failing that, to “someone else.” It can feel easier to look away and continue imagining motherhood as a sacred, apolitical realm.
But speaking as someone who has given birth and is raising a child, I don’t believe there is anything inherently exceptional about being a mother. I know this may be an uncomfortable statement, but I stand by it. Everything typically associated with motherhood holds true for me: I love my child deeply, I have sacrificed my body and professional life, and I would do it all again without hesitation. I am even happier as a parent than I was before. In that sense, I could be mistaken for a pro-natalist ideal. Still, I cannot pretend that this role is somehow extraordinary, because I understand that the social and political structures that elevate my relationship with my child above all others—and that place the burden of care almost entirely on me—are not natural. They are constructed. The long American tradition of compelling people to care, often under coercive conditions, remains foundational to our society, and there is little indication that this will change in 2025.
For me, then, mothering opens onto a historical awareness that is deeply tied to grief. It also raises urgent questions about the present: Why is there nowhere to rest while carrying a child through an American city? Why is childcare so scarce? Why was I encouraged—unsuccessfully—to give birth on my back? Art that addresses mothers and mothering succeeds most when it embraces ambiguity and ambivalence. This is difficult work. How can one capture both the joy of freely given care and the fear that comes with such vulnerability? How can the exhausting demands of sustaining life coexist with the wonder of watching a child grow? Some artists manage this balance exceptionally well, conveying the intense mixture of ecstasy and dread that can accompany motherhood. As interdisciplinary work increasingly reveals, understanding mothering today is essential to understanding the fragility of our freedoms. Mothering is not only shaped by its time—it often exists ahead of it.