Artist-Mothers: Where to Find Them and Who Supports Them
Below is a list of artists and resources pertaining to artist-mothers. There are many more. If you know of any that are not listed here, please leave a comment below!
Artist-Mothers in Southern California
It is a challenge to encapsulate each artist’s work in just a few sentences. The words reflected in their one-liners were culled from their respective websites, galleries or other platforms that have published their biographies. If there are any changes that should be made, please leave a comment below.
Kim Abeles is an artist whose community-based projects explore biography, geography and environment. She has created projects with the California Science Center, air pollution control agencies, health clinics and mental health departments, and natural history museums in California, Colorado and Florida.
TanyaAguiñiga is a Los Angeles based artist/designer/craftsperson who was raised in Tijuana, Mexico. Her current work uses craft as a performative medium to generate dialogues about identity, culture and gender while creating community. This approach has helped Museums and non-profits in the United States and Mexico diversify their audiences by connecting marginalized communities through collaboration.
Cathy Akers is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She has previously been interviewed on “Artbound” for her work on de-skilled ceramics here.
Sophia Allison is a sculptor, paper maker, and installation artist and teacher based in Los Angeles.
Nancy Baker Cahill is a multi-disciplinary artist and founder of 4th Wall, a free Augmented Reality (AR) app which allows users to place art in 360 degrees anywhere in the world.
Audrey Chan is a Los Angeles-based artist, writer, and educator whose research-based projects articulate political and cultural identities through allegorical narrative and the feminist construct of “the personal is political.” Chan’s projects include paintings, digital compositions, videos, and performances.
Chenhung Chen is a Los Angeles-based artist who crochets electrical wire and computer components. Her work is an exploration of the driving force that is bringing about this informational age and the underlying tension that is apparent in that, even with all this technology, man still has to grapple with the consequences of his human condition.
Njideka Akunyili Crosby is a Los Angeles-based Nigerian painter. She won the MacArthur fellowship in 2017.
Lili Bernard is a Cuban-born, Los Angeles-based visual artist and actor whose work explores sexism and racism in the past and present.
Jacqueline Bell Johnson is a sculpture and installation artist that uses craft processes to make form. Her work explores themes of feminism, labor, and the autobiographical.
Alison Blickle is an artist who creates oil on canvas paintings. She said of her work “My paintings explore my desire to feel a connection to something larger than myself -- be it nature, family, or history. The women I paint are often stand-ins for myself; I put them in surreal situations and live vicariously through them. “
Shaktima Brien is a writer and an artist, who writes and exhibits in Los Angeles and the California Desert.
Rebecca Campbell is a painter who creates oil on canvas works that explore the complexities of being a woman.
CarolynCastaño is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explores identity, gender and social conditions facing women.
Deedee Cheriel is a visual artist whose work explores narratives that recognize the urgency and conflict in our continuing attempts to connect to the world. Her images are indications of how we try to connect ourselves to others and how these satirical and heroic efforts are episodes of compassion and discomfort.
Olivia Chumacero is an activist, poet, filmmaker, permaculturist, Raramuri elder, consultant and preservationist for the Los Angeles State Historic Park.
Andrea Chung is a San Diego-based artist whose work explores the legacies of colonialism and migration.
Irina Contreras is an Oakland/L.A.-based interdisciplinary artist. Her projects examine personal reflections and the speculative origins of collective memory and trauma.
Ginny Cook's work engages the intersection and materiality of langauge and image in order to explore ideas related to decay, mortality and loss.
With levity and wit, Meg Cranston investigates the intersections between individual and shared experience and how imagery and objects acquire meaning in our culture, according to the Hammer Museum.
Jamie Crooke Powell is an artist, educator, and administrator based in Pasadena, CA. She graduated from the Otis Public Practice MFA program in 2011, and is currently the Programs
Manager at The Pasadena Educational Foundation in Pasadena, CA. Her art practice is comprised of project-based artworks utilizing a service-based model exploring the intersection of urban planning and public health.
As both an artist and filmmaker, Jill D’Agnenica is a visual storyteller, a lover of narrative and a delighted fan of the myriad ways in which a story can be told. Explorations of community and interconnection are recurring themes her visual art work, made manifest at various stages of the art making process, from concept and fabrication to the final presentation of the piece.
Gilda Davidian is a photographer based in Los Angeles. Apart from her art, she is also the founder of Hey Baby, a feminist parenting group.
Cultural identity and the human ramifications of political and social events are the inspiration for JoyceDallal's work. She employs a variety of media, from small prints and collages to large installations and public commissions that often involve a public participatory component.
Chelsea Dean is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work embodies systems that erode. She salvages history, suspending the architecture of Southern California in time with a process of carefully controlled chaos. By combining her photographs with experimental printmaking, drawing, and collage techniques, Dean elevates the conflict between order and entropy.
Lisa Diane Wedgeworth is a Los Angeles-based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is rooted in storytelling. Informed by personal narratives, her work takes form as painting, video, installation, performance, photography and archived oral histories.
Leslie Dick is an artist and writers in Southern California.
Sarita Doe is an artist whose work dwells on cultural and environmental activism.
After years of painting, Pam Douglas's work came off the wall this year in a visceral response to current political forces, a refusal to be repressed. She is also a professor at the USC School of Cinematic Arts.
Carlee Fernandez is an artist based in Southern California. According to her biography for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, she “defines herself as a sculptor, although photography is often her medium of choice to explore familiar or fanciful three-dimensional forms.”
Drawing and photography has always been the way Michelle Feirro begins her work and how she develop her ideas for paintings. The remnants she attaches to the surface of her paintings remind her of her source material and comes from my need to show a bit of the underbelly of her studio practice.
Rachel Finkelstein is a multidisciplinary feminist/lesbian artist. She is a co-founder of Circles, currently named Cinenova, the first women’s film distribution group in the United Kingdom. My work has been widely shown in Europe and in Israel. After she moved to the United States in 1987, she took a role in the Gay Liberation Movement by actively countering societal shame with gay pride, in the same feminist spirit of the “personal is political.” She focused on the need for society to recognize the rights of Same-Sex Marriages and the family units of those unions. She practiced her political beliefs personally by creating a same-sex family with her wife.
Dwora Fried creates tiny tableaux inside glass-fronted boxes. Her small rooms evoke what it was like to grow up as an outsider in postwar Vienna.
Terri Friedman is an artist, mother, teacher and global traveler. She was born in Colorado, educated in Rhode Island, India, and Los Angeles.
Tina Frugoli makes brightly colored flat paintings in which the viewer's focus may flow in and out of abstraction. In one moment a landscape might be seen and objects recognized, while in the next they might notice shapes and areas of color.
Cheri Gaulke is an artist whose feminist artwork has been instrumental in raising the awareness in themes such as religion, sexual identity, and the environment. Though Gaulke has moved away from performance, the feminist art strategies that she helped to innovate in the 1970s in southern California continue in her work. Her art continues to be a vehicle for social commentary and as a way to tell the stories of individuals and groups under-represented in society.
Kristy Guevara-Flanagan is a documentary filmmaker whose work centers around stories of women and their representation in society. Her most recent feature, “Wonder Women! The Untold Story of American Superheroines,” traces the evolution and legacy of the comic book hero Wonder Woman as a way to reflect on society's anxieties about women's liberation.
Maya Gurantz is an artist in video, performance, installation and community-generated projects. She uses these diverse media to interrogate the social imaginaries of American culture and how constructions of gender, race, class and progress operate in our shared myths, public rituals and private desires.
Tanya Haden sings and plays cello as one of The Haden Triplets. Her work has been included in numerous multi-artist projects organized by the artist Steven Hull which have included exhibitions, songs, and videos for which catalogs have been published
Alejandra Herrera Silva is a visual artist and performer from Santiago (Chile), currently living in Los Angeles. She has been an active organizer, artist and teacher in the field of performance art for more than a decade and has exhibited her work extensively, both in her native Chile and internationally.
Katie Herzog is a visual artist, mother of two, educator and library worker. Through various material and formal applications, her work engages the physical, digital, and psychological interface between the body, information authority, and hierarchies in which information is accessed and disseminated.
KenyattaA.C.Hinkle is an interdisciplinary visual artist, writer and performer. Her practice fluctuates between collaborations and participatory projects with alternative gallery spaces within various communities to projects that are intimate and based upon her private experiences in relationship to historical events and contexts. A term that has become a mantra for her practice is the "Historical Present," as she examines the residue of history and how it affects our contemporary world perspective.
Stephanie Hutin is a is a Franco-American artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles by way of Miami, Florida. Hutin focuses on the performative aspects of animation, which often lead to community-based happenings, interventions, comedy, films, videos, curatorial projects, writings, and lectures, meant to challenge the way frame by frame works are read.
Alyson Iwamoto is a clay artist who creates jewelry and décor inspired by Los Angeles and her culture.
Cathy Immordino is a photographic artist who uses photography as the basis for elaborate compositions. Immordino lives in Los Angeles (Silver Lake) and holds a BFA in photography from the Academy of Art University.
Michele Jaquis is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and academic administrator based in Los Angeles, CA. She “combines strategies of conceptual art, documentary and social practice to examine the complexities within personal and social relationships, identity, language and communication, resulting in a range of image-based, object-based and engagement-based projects.”
Denise Johnson is an Instructional Assistant Professor in Art History and has taught at Chapman University since 2014. Johnson has curated a number of contemporary art exhibitions examining feminism, motherhood, and California's contested history and has written for Make/Shift magazine.
Siri Kaur’s photographs de-center the classical narrative structure through subtle dislocations of time and space, leaving out clues that would complete the narrative as a whole and inviting the viewer to participate in finishing the story. Her work seizes on the corroding sense of uneasiness that gnaws at our most cherished attachments: it’s not that we can’t go home again; it’s that home was never exactly what we thought it was.
Sant Khalsa is an artist and activist whose projects develop from her inquiry into the nature of place and complex environmental and societal issues. She resides in Joshua Tree
Mary Kelly is known for her project-based work, addressing questions of sexuality, identity and historical memory in the form of large-scale narrative installations.
Kim Kimbro Taylor is a contemporary artist based in Los Angeles.
Soo Kim often employs techniques of cutting and layering in order to introduce areas of absence or disruption in what we tend to take for granted--the interpretation of photographic images, according to the Getty.
Olga Koumoundouros is a contemporary artist in Los Angeles who is known for “Notorious Possession,” where she occupies foreclosed homes with art. Her work focuses on social justice and equality.
Mining the intersections between documentary and poetic approaches, Laura Larson’s work investigates historical subjects and the process of remembrance, considering photography’s unique address of the subject of memory. Larson is the author of "Hidden Mother," published by Saint Lucy Books, which was short-listed for the 2017 Aperture/Paris Photo First Photo Book Award. She is based in Columbus, OH, and teaches photography at Ohio University.
Kristy Lovich is a cultural worker is intent on building new forms of knowledge that reveal relationships between place, communication, perception, and the construction of social narrative, centering the sites of relational connection within this constellation as a gesture toward the recovery of mutual care and inter-community wellbeing.
Irene Lusztig is an internationally-exhibited, award-winning filmmaker, media archeologist, and visual artist. While her creative work extends across a range of moving image forms (long form cinema essay, web-based interactive projects, and–most recently–video for gallery and museum exhibition), in all of her work she maintains a strong connection to feminist historiography and archival practices, an investment in rigorous and sustained interdisciplinary research into her subject of inquiry, and a conviction that filmmaking itself can constitute a profound act of reframing, recuperating, and reanimating forgotten or neglected histories.
Sue Maberry graduated from Pitzer College with a major in art and worked for 15 years in arts administration. After attending the Feminist Studio Workshop at the Woman's Building from 1976-77, she joined the WB staff serving as a program director and later became director of the Women's Graphic Center, its profit-making arm. She also worked as an artist and graphic designer, collaborating with numerous artists and art groups and is a cofounder of Sisters Of Survival.
Meg Madison is a artist who uses photography to conceptually examine memory, ritual, land use, water, feminism, and aging.
Marissa Magdalena is a Los Angeles based artist who enjoys questioning the norms of physical and social space. Her work inhabits a place between sculpture and performance. Marissa cultivated a dramatic aesthetic amid the dressing racks and theater sets of California’s great San Joaquin Valley where she grew up. The juxtaposition of Marissa’s farming community roots and current urban backdrop is a wellspring of inspiration.
Elana Mann creates artwork that brings a greater consciousness to the listening and speaking we practice in everyday life.
Alanna Marcelletti’s mixed media works straddle painting and sculpture. Her pieces focus on the experiences of womanhood by looking at both societal norms and inner monologue.
Aline Mare is a visual artist coming from a background of experimental film and performance, currently making hand finished imagery in a fusion of technique and narrative
Emily Mast “makes performances and installations that incorporate bodies, movement, sound and light as live sculptural material,” according to Praxis Interview Magazine.
Monica Mayer is “a pioneer of Mexico's feminist art movement. She's spent 40 years making art about women's experiences from motherhood to life under the patriarchy,” according to the Lenny Letter.
Alessandra Moctezuma is a gallery director and professor at San Diego Mesa College.
Cynthia Minet’s sculptures, drawings and installations stem from her interests in scientific, political, and ecological issues. Made from translucent post-consumer plastics and LEDS, her work often prompts viewers to ponder the complicated roles that plastics, consumer culture, and electricity play in our lives.
Maysha Mohamedi is an Iranian-American painter who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her studio is located in the Fashion District in Downtown L.A. but she uses materials from all over: from beach tar that she collects with her sons on the beaches of Santa Barbara to tubes of Middle Eastern paint imported from her mother country of Iran.
Margaret Morgan is a contemporary artist whose work draws upon feminism, structuralism, and theories of post-modernism. Her work takes the form of installations made of plumbing systems; drawings in urine and builder's chalk; and photography.
Born and raised in Los Angeles to a night club singer and a celebrated teacher, Rosalyn Myles has shown an interest in the arts since she was 10 years old. She experimented with film, photography, print, and the various mediums present in her interdisciplinary practice evident in her work today.
Rebecca Niederlander’s sculptures and site-specific installations are labor-intense abstractions that use repetition and the inherent ephemeral nature of the materials to address the individual’s position within the larger intergenerational community; as well as the micro and macro nature of ego and ego’s relationship to the necessities of solitude and boredom in the creation of individual thought. She also co-founded the social practice BROODWORK in which she curated, wrote and designed actions and objects that explored the interweaving of the creative practices and family life — in particular, parenthood.
Catherine Opie “investigates the ways in which photographs both document and give voice to social phenomena in America today, registering people’s attitudes and relationships to themselves and others, and the ways in which they occupy the landscape. At the core of her investigations are perplexing questions about relationships to community, which she explores on multiple levels across all her bodies of work,” according to Art21.
Julie Orser’s “photography and video works consistently engage with the mechanics of American cinema, with a particular focus on representations of women in film,” as explained this KCET Artbound article.
Arzu Ozkai is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose work focus on design’s role in looking for forms of creative and critical outcomes through participation and collaboration.
Amanda Pahner is a performer, writer, giver, taker, yeller, listener, love-lover, rule-hater, ukulele-freak and piano-slayer. She is the co-founder of the punk cabaret duo The Dresden Dolls. She collaborated with Jherek Bischoff on this video dedicated to the current administration.
Claudia Parducci is an L.A.-based artist whose practice covers a variety of mediums and forms, including rope/ twine/ sculpture/ drawing/ painting. Her work relates to the fallibility of architecture and history, things falling apart and the labor of rebuilding.
“L” Pedersen has worked as a social worker in various roles throughout the years and has painted throughout her life, especially with a creative arts therapies background. She calls herself a "Conscious Seed Planter", enjoying how both her social activism and art have aligned and as a Los Angeles Art Association emerging artist; her current collaboration involves the painting on female models that have experienced one of the following: cancer, an eating disorder, intimate partner violence and/or abuse.
Alice Marie Perreault makes mixed media art generated through daily ritual and accumulation. Perreault is interested in relationships with medical science, supportive technologies and social accessibility. She pairs art materials with medical supplies, adaptive equipment, natural forms, toys and objects of domesticity as responses to culture, caretaking and physical sustainability.
Mary Anna Pomonis is a Los Angeles-based artist and founder of the feminist collective the Association of Hysteric Curators. Pomonis’ work focuses on the intersections of art and pedagogy. She is also one half of the artist collaborative project Resurrecting Matilda with photographer Allison Stewart.
Nicole Rademacher is an L.A.-based artist explores and questions ideas dealing with adoption, reunion, and family through her art. She creates visual art, videos, and engages with the community.
Heather Rasmussen is a Los Angeles-based artist.
Calida Rawles is an interdisciplinary artist who explores intersecting themes connecting race and gender through painting, sculpture, installation and writing. Rawles wrote and illustrated the children’s book, Same Difference, which addresses beauty and identity, and chronicles her parenthood journey on her blog CrazyMomWithKids.com.
Kaitlynn Redell’s practice is invested in dismantling socially constructed, categorizations of the body. More specifically she is interested in in-betweenness and how “unidentifiable” bodies — that do not identify with standard categories — negotiate identity.
Alison Ragguette has developed an expansive approach to making sculptural objects in porcelain, glass, and rubber. Her work is about the surrender and control of motherhood and laments how messy and precarious the process can be.
Celia Rocha’s artwork explores universal issues of gender and collective identity, culture and memory, while it is imbued with the feeling of saudade, a typically Portuguese trait roughly translated as a nostalgic longing or yearning of someone or something of the past.
Frederika B. Roeder is a fourth generation native Southern Californian, whose work follows the paths of Minimalism and the Light and Space movements, while finding its roots in Southern California’s natural environment. Painting with brush and knife, she often uses materials influenced by the surfing and skiing industries: fluorescent sprays, iridescents, epoxy resins, beaded glass gels and inks to achieve the luminosity in her paintings: the glare of the sun on a gritty Los Angeles street; the iridescent grunion in the Pacific waters at low tide; the dangerous grayness of a whiteout in the High Sierras.
Catherine Ruane. Read more about her nature-inspired work on KCET.
Betye Saar is “an important part of the Black L.A. art movement in the 1970s, and one of Los Angeles' modern art iconoclasts,” according to this KCET Artbound article. She is known for her assemblage work.
Alison Saar “creates artworks that frequently transform found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion,” according to the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Lezley Saar “has worked with paint, fabric, photographs, and found objects to investigate issues such as hybridity, identity, and acceptance,” according to the Wall Street International Magazine.
Shizu Saldamando "depicts how American social spaces are the laboratories for new ways of being. Her portraits playfully suggest that race, gender, and ethnicity act as white noise to the scene at hand; audible, yet not identifiable. Saldamando’s visual biographies, which use friends as her subjects, capture the energy of youthful experimentation and the freedom of malleable categories for identity," according to the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery.
Kim Schoenstadt is a conceptual artist based in Los Angeles. Her “Now Be Here” Project gathered and photographed en masse female and female identifying artists. The project website lists the names of the artists in their respective cities to be used as a database. Her studio practice focuses on exploring our relationship with place through architecture.
Situated in the hybrid world of art and science, Lucy HG Solomon explores the impact of percussive human actions on animals and ecosystems.
Isabel Theselius investigates themes such as mortality, desire, and longing by drawing from her own experiences, memories, and family relationships. By revealing private moments often avoided or overlooked Theselius engages with social conventions that obscure what she sees as the most important parts of living. These anecdotes take the shape of mixed media installations, video, sculpture, drawing and events. By receding into the past Theselius makes sense of the present through humor and vulnerability. Addressing difficult or fleeting moments Theselius spark viewers own lost memories, triggering the contemplation of our shared experiences and possible futures.
Elizabeth Tobias is an interdisciplinary artist, activist and Expressive Arts Therapist creating immersive works of art and public events that address timely humanitarian issues such as discrimination, oppression, food scarcity and climate change. Her multimedia projects serve to increase public awareness, provoke constructive dialogue and to promote peace and progress.
Elizabeth Tremante lives and works in Los Angeles.
Victoria Vesna is an Artist and Professor at the UCLA Department of Design Media Arts and Director of the Art|Sci Center at the School of the Arts (North campus) and California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) (South campus). Although she was trained early on as a painter, her curious mind took her on an exploratory path that resulted in work can be defined as experimental creative research residing between disciplines and technologies. With her installations she investigates how communication technologies affect collective behavior and perceptions of identity shift in relation to scientific innovation
Anne Walsh produces works in video, performance, audio, photography and text.
Marnie Weber’s “multifaceted, interconnected practice encompasses performance, film, video, sculpture, collage, music and costume. Blending the carnivalesque, the bacchanalian, the mystical and the absurd, Weber creates uncanny worlds that exist in a realm between fantasy and reality, and invite viewers to an exploration of the subconscious,” according to Simon Lee Gallery.
Ruth Weisberg is “is well known for her paintings reflecting upon the cycle of life; the continuity of generations. The artist also has long held interests in preservation, extinction and survival,” according to Jack Rutberg Fine Arts.
Gosia Wojas is the founder of Projekt Papier, an archive platform documenting and promoting artistic, curatorial and art historical practices. Editor of upcoming series, The Absent Museum, utopian exhibition proposals, and Material-i-ty, a collection of essays examining nations of materiality within contemporary and social culture.
Cathy Weiss is inspired by the relevance of cross cultural and historical story and myth and how it is relevant in today’s world.
Bari Ziperstein creates site-specific sculptures that challenge viewers to discern the familiar from the strange, and to question psychological, economical and emotional attachments that consumers and history place on spaces and objects.
Some Projects About Art and Motherhood
Judy Chicago’s Birth Project - Artist Judy Chicago collaborated with over 150 needleworkers to create images in paint and needlework that celebrate the birth process.
Broodwork is a cross-disciplinary art and design project that names the previously unspoken community of practitioners whose work realized an unexpected perspectival shift after becoming parents.
Jessica Sabogal’s murals - A graffiti artist, Sabogal’s murals are a tribute to women of all shapes and sizes.
The Breastpump Hackathon - A movement to create better technology around breastfeeding and postpartum health with a focus on affordability and access, as well as cultural diversity.
A breast-feeding nurse-in, to protest expulsion of a nursing mother from a mall - A public demonstration of breastfeeding moms after a woman was asked to leave when she publicly breastfed her child.
Mierle Laderman Ukeles, motherhood as Maintenance Art - Frustrated by the double standard of work in the art world versus maintenance workers and housewives, artist Ukeles wrote a manifesto and asked 300 custodial workers to spend an hour of their shifts as art instead of labor.
New Maternalisms, by Natalie Loveless - A meditation on the social construct of motherhood as it has progressed from the 1970s days of women’s liberation to today.
Katie Vigos’ Empowered Birth Project - Vigos’ Instagram account depicts real-life images of the birth process in all its gore and glory.
Buy art made by mothers at the Procreate Project -The Procreate Project is the first art organization that supports contemporary artist who are also mothers across various art forms.
The Motherhood Archives by Irene Lusztig - This online archive by Lusztig is a collection of home movies, films, propaganda on the maternal throughout the 20th century, which show the medicalization and institutionalization of birth and motherhood in America.
The Tangled Intersection of Art-Making and Care-Taking - A panel discussion of five South Texas artist-mothers and artist Raul Gonzalez that answers questions about artistic process and the balance of contemporary art-making and parenting.
Hidden Mother, Laura Larson - Author Laura Larson charted the story of her daughter from Ethiopia through hidden mother photographs, a little known 19th-century portrait practice of hiding a mother’s body to support and calm her child during the lengthy time demanded by early photographic technology.
Home Truths: Photography and Motherhood (exhibition) - This exhibition aims to challenge stereotypes and sentimental views of motherhood through the work of nine photography artists. It addresses gender roles, domesticity, the body and the identity of individuals within the family.
Mothernisms, by Lise Haller Baggesen - A nomadic tent camp audio installation and book dedicated to staking out and making speakable the “mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse.”
The M/Other Voices Project - Led by artist, researcher and writer Deirdre M. Donoghue, the M/Other voices project aims to start the discussion on the doing of maternal theory within arts and other fields of cultural production.
Jill Miller’s Milk Truck - Created by artists Jill Miller, the Milk Truck is a truck with a giant boob on the roof, meant to be a mobile breastfeeding unit that allows mothers to breastfeed their babies where they have been discouraged — typically in public spaces. It is part guerilla theater, activism and slapstick humor.
Camen Winant’s collection of images of women giving birth - Part of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Being: New Photography 2018,” this book and photographic installation brings together real-life photos of women during their birthing experience. It tackles the real images and questions that come about the birthing process, which are usually not discussed openly or with candor.
Artist-Mother Collectives and Groups
AMAA the Archive for Mapping Mother Artists in Asia
Artist Parent index is a searchable database of artists, exhibits and resources exploring reproduction and caretaking.
Chicana M(other)work are five mother-scholars who identify as Chicana-Indigena, Chicana and Afro-Chicana: Christine Vega, Cecilia Caballero, Dr. Yvette Martinez-Vu, Dr. Judy Perez-Torres, Dr. Michelle Telez
Creative Collaborative Mothers FB group
Digital Institute for Early Parenthood
Hey Baby, a feminist parenting group with artist-mother members such as: Gilda Davidian, Katy Robinson, Ching Ching Cheng, Fiona Chang, Kaitlynn Redell, Sarah Eggers, Anna Barre. Membership is open.
Polvo de Gallina Negra (Feminist Art Collective in Mexico)
WE (tbd) Collective: Olga Koumoundouros, Francesca Lalanne, von curtis, Ophelia Marquez, Jennifer Moon, Alexander Kroll, John Birtle
Articles
“How Motherhood Affects Creativity,” The Atlantic
“On Being an Artist and a Mother,” Hyperallergic
“The tragic reason Disney movies rarely have mother characters,” E!Online
“When an Artist Becomes a Mother,” Sisterhood
Griselda Pollock’s insightful essay on the way the feminine experience affects composition in the Impressionist paintings by women artists, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity”
The Home that the Woman’s Building Built: Cheri Gaulke and Sue Maberry Construct A Visual Narrative of the Lesbian Family written by Anne Swartz
“On the power of women supporting women - women at an airport encircle a mother whose toddler is having a meltdown” The Good News Network
Books
“Maternal Theory: Essential Readings,” Andrea O’Reilly
“Of Woman Born,” Adrianne Rich
“The Great Mother: Women, Maternity, and Power in Art and Visual Culture, 1900-2015,” Massimiliano Gioni
Feminist Art and the Maternal, Andrea Liss
Mother Reader, Essential Writings on Motherhood, Moyra Davey
The M Word, Real Mothers in Contemporary Art, Myrel Chernick and Jennie Klein
The Mother Knot, Jane Lazarre
Tanya Selvaratnam’s “The Big Lie: Motherhood, Feminism, and the Reality of the Biological Clock”
Grants, Residencies and Links to Other Resources
The Red Thread is an experimental grant structure where artists in need apply to receive $999 to use in the way they like to support their creative work. Once able, they then pass on that same exact money to another artist-parent of their choosing.
The Pen Parentis Writing Fellowship is geared toward writer-parents. They are awarded a year of promotion and publication of their story by Brain, Child Magazine and a $1,000 prize.
An Artist Residency in Motherhood is a self-directed open-source artist residency directed toward artist-mothers.
Artwork Archive’s “Complete Guide to 2018 Artist Grants and Opportunities”
Additional contributions by Andrea Chung, Carren Jao and Kristy Lovich.
Notes
[i] It is a challenge to encapsulate each artist’s work in just a few sentences. The words reflected in their one-liners were culled from their respective websites, galleries or other platforms that have published their biographies. If there are any changes that should be made, please leave a comment below.
