Art and the Politics of Motherhood

Courtney Kessel, In Balance With, 2015

Lesson

Your students have probably already encountered many images of mothers in their traditional art history classes, perhaps most notably for them will be the many Madonnas made during the Renaissance era in Western Europe likely shown during their introductory courses. Despite the ubiquity of this imagery in art, motherhood and its surrounding complexities have historically been, and continue to be, a taboo subject matter for many artists who are women. After introducing this idea to students, you may show them quotes from artists, creative writers, and scholars who have reflected on the topic:

• “One day, in the early seventies, during a seminar at art school… a fellow student gave a lecture on women artists and, to my surprise, at the end of her presentation most of the (male) students agreed that it was because of our biology, we could never be as good artists as them: motherhood took up all of our creativity.” – Mónica Mayer
• “I don’t think I’d be making work [if I were a mother]. I would have been either 100 per cent mother or 100 per cent artist. I’m not flaky and I don’t compromise. Having children and being a mother… It would be a compromise to be an artist at the same time… There are good artists that have children. Of course there are. They are called men.” – Tracy Emin 
• “One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it. In my opinion that’s the reason why women aren’t as successful as men in the art world. There’s plenty of talented women. Why do men take over the important positions? It’s simple. Love, family, children – a woman doesn’t want to sacrifice all of that.” – Marina Abramovic
• “I used to believe that maximizing the number of hours reading, writing, and thinking about writing would make me the best writer I could be, and that my friend who had chosen to have three children just didn’t value being a writer as much as I did.” – Sara Manguso
• “If one manages to be excellent professionally while engaged in the practice of motherhood it is, generally speaking, understood as being despite one’s status as mother… Be excellent professionally or excellent at mothering. Do not allow one to taint the other.” – Natalie Loveless 

Give students some time to reflect on these quotes by asking them the questions: Why do you think this is the case? Do you think this is still true today? This works best in a think-pair-share activity with time to free-write, share with their neighbors, and then reflect as a whole class. The primary goal of this activity is to get students to both identify the complexities of why artists might feel this way about art and motherhood, which gets to the root of the historic divide between artmaking and motherhood. The primary concepts to draw out will be:

• Prior to the contemporary period, mothers have most often been represented by men. These images have contributed to the construction of ideals of motherhood that differ depending on context but often are connected to limiting gender norms.
• Both motherhood and artmaking have been conceived as laborious activities that require an immense amount of time and investment (physically and emotionally) to do them well. Thus one aspect must be sacrificed to excel in the other. 
• Motherhood is viewed as laborious (for reasons stated above) and yet has also not been valued as labor. This is justified through gendered expectations regarding “maternal instincts” and women’s innate ability for care. In choosing to be both a mother and an artist, women often take on the burden of unpaid labor (referred to as the “double shift”) while trying to forge their professional careers in art. If women choose not to have children, they often confront the stigma of shirking their “natural” instincts and failing to fulfill the role of mother.
• Artworks made about children or motherhood have traditionally been deemed less intellectually, politically, or culturally relevant to art history due to their associations with the personal and/or domestic sphere. To be considered a “serious” artist, many artists who are mothers have opted to not make work about that aspect of their lives. 

In addition to outlining the basis for this conceptual separation between “artist” and “mother” this activity encourages students to understand the relevance of this dynamic in their own world and lives. Be prepared for students to share their own experiences, for example, their experiences with their own mothers, their experiences as a parent, feelings regarding having or not having children, and fears regarding restrictions to reproductive freedom or access to care. These reflections are essential in asserting the importance of the interventions made by the artists under discussion as they are all grappling with similar questions regarding the politics of motherhood in their lives and creative work. 

This discussion helps to introduce the key questions for this lecture, which asks students to engage with the ways artist-women have confronted the politics of motherhood since the late nineteenth-century. Here “politics” refers not only to government or policy, but more broadly to the social norms, cultural expectations, and power structures that shape how motherhood is represented, valued, or stigmatized in art and society. The lecture moves chronologically from the modern to the contemporary period, examining varied representations of motherhood, including pregnancy, childbirth, maternal labor and lived maternal experience, that challenge normative maternal imagery and constructions. It also critically considers artworks that engage with the choice not to become a mother and explores how art has been used to advocate for reproductive freedom.

Paula Modersohn-Becker, Reclining Mother and Child II, 1906

Modern Artists and Motherhood

German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker provides a good starting point to begin tracing these questions historically, as she is credited as one of the first modernist artists to depict herself explicitly as a pregnant woman. In Self-Portrait on Her Sixth Wedding Anniversary (1906), Modersohn-Becker presents herself standing confidently and partially nude wearing an amber necklace, with a hand resting on her stomach, a gesture that suggests to the viewer that she is pregnant. Students might be surprised to learn that, despite these indicators, Modersohn-Becker was not pregnant at the time she painted this image. You might speculate with students as to why she would choose to depict herself this way, making connections to your previous discussion regarding constructions of motherhood and artmaking. At this moment in Modersohn-Becker’s life, she was living alone in Paris after having recently separated from her husband, the artist Otto Modersohn. She also signed this painting “P.B.” (Paula Becker), perhaps as a gesture of independence that recognized her desire to forge her own career separate from her husband. We might consider this image as the artist imagining a future in which she will be a mother, but we might also think about the questions she is posing about women’s generative capacity as artistic subjects.

It is useful to consider this image alongside Modersohn-Becker’s many portraits of confident, nude, and structurally solid mothers with their children, such as Mother and Child (1907). These works reject normative representations of the sensualized nude body and sentimental views of maternity to instead present those engaging in maternal labors as simultaneously tender and strong. Other modern artists, such as Mary Cassatt and Tina Modotti, similarly focused on strength in their images of mothers with children. You might bring Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath (1893) and Modotti’s Mother and Child, Tehuantepec (1929) into discussion surrounding their interventions into traditional Renaissance-era Madonna and Child imagery and the ways they challenge stereotypes of women’s passivity or weakness. American painter Mary Cassatt’s depictions of maternal labor in Paris remind us that the domestic sphere is also a workplace, and it is important to note that many of her models were not mothers to these children, but hired caregivers. Italian-born Tina Modotti’s photographs of mothers in Tehuantepec, a region in Mexico known for its distinct indigenous culture, also engage with issues of gender and class. Tehuantepec has often been described as “matriarchal” due to the significant role women play in managing the local economy, though it should be noted that men still hold most political power. In post-revolutionary Mexico, this mythology of Tehuantepec as a society led by strong and independent women resonated with nationalist ideals, as artists and politicians alike sought cultural symbols that embodied resilience, authenticity, and continuity with Indigenous traditions. Modotti’s images draw on this mythology, capturing the strength and self-determination associated with Tehuana women, seen here as a pregnant mother effortlessly protects a vulnerable child with one arm.

It is interesting to note that each of these artists considered this to be important subject matter in their work despite none of them being mothers at the time. Neither Cassatt nor Modotti went on to have children later in life. Modersohn-Becker eventually had a child in 1907; however, she tragically passed away from complications due to a postpartum pulmonary embolism. Her story is a poignant reminder of how dangerous childbirth was and continues to be. 

While motherhood has long been a taboo subject for artists, works addressing the choice or experience of not becoming a mother are even more uncommon. One rare example is Mexican artist Frida Kahlo’s Henry Ford Hospital (1932), which offers a raw and deeply personal depiction of the artist’s experience with pregnancy loss. Here Kahlo portrays herself nude and bleeding in a hospital bed, set against a cold, uninhabited landscape lined by the industrial city of Detroit, an image that potentially underscores her sense of exposure or loneliness. Red cords emerge from her body tethered to objects that float around her: above is a medical model of a female reproductive system, a fetus, and a snail; below is a metal machine, a wilted orchid, and a skeletal pelvis. Together, these objects symbolize the complexity of an experience that was simultaneously embodied, emotional, and clinical. In his autobiography, Diego Rivera wrote about the importance of this and other works Kahlo had created surrounding her experience in Detroit: “Frida began work on a series of masterpieces which had no precedent in the history of art—paintings which exalted the feminine qualities of endurance of truth, reality, cruelty, and suffering. Never before had a woman put such agonized poetry on canvas as Frida did at this time in Detroit.” Refusing sentimental views of maternal experience, Kahlo fearlessly foregrounded the realities of pain, loss, and vulnerability women so often experience. 

German artist Käthe Kollwitz also drew from her own experience with maternal loss to create works that reimagined motherhood in ways that articulated her own politics. Kollwitz’s black-and-white prints focused on the hardships of the working class, often made visible through the experiences of mothers and children. Images like Woman with Dead Child (1903) were inspired by her husband’s work as a physician serving impoverished families in Berlin, where child mortality rates were high. Kollwitz used herself and her then seven-year-old son, Peter, as models for this image, which updated Michelangelo’s Pietá, as a modern expression of maternal grief. Kollwitz’s exploration of maternal grief became more personal after Peter died in 1914, during the early days of World War I. Her print, The Mothers (1922–23), depicts maternal figures with their arms locked in a protective embrace that surrounds a young child who peeks out of the lower right corner. Though they are a defiantly solid, enduring, and resilient block, Kollwitz still captures the fear on their faces, a deep anxiety experienced by so many suffering through war, poverty, and civil unrest. 

The early maternal sculptures of American artist Elizabeth Catlett also center on sociopolitical issues and connect with the artist’s commitment to fighting against injustice. Catlett had committed her artistic practice to fighting against racism and abuses of power, a position she developed early in her career while at Howard University where she was taught by noted figures of the Harlem Renaissance, including artist Lois Mailou Jones and philosopher Alain Locke. Catlett’s MFA thesis project at the University of Iowa resulted in the limestone sculpture, Mother and Child (1941), which was awarded first prize at the Negro Exhibition in Chicago. This work exemplifies the visual vocabulary Catlett developed over the courses of her career in emphasizing Black women’s dignity and strength, while also reclaiming a maternal bond historically and violently denied to enslaved Black women. Catlett asserts this core relationship as a symbol of resilience, love, and survival in the intimacy of these two bodies joined here as one. Catlett continued to represent this subject matter in sculptures and prints throughout her career, and scholars have argued her positive images of motherhood were tied to an ongoing need to challenge stereotypes of Black women as “bad mothers.” 

Women’s Activism, Art, and Motherhood (1960s – 1980s)

A generation later, artists working within the context of the civil rights, student, and women’s movements emerging around the world continued to challenge conventional images of motherhood in their work. Elizabeth Catlett’s hand colored lithograph The Torture of Mothers (1970) (see above) is a poignant example of the merging of these sociopolitical concerns and a good way to bridge across modern and postmodern generations. Catlett was awarded a fellowship to travel to Mexico City in 1946, where she was influenced by the political art of the Taller de Gráfica Popular. She remained in Mexico for most of her life, renouncing her US citizenship in 1962; however, she remained deeply in touch with issues facing those in the United States and the ongoing global struggle against racism. The imagery for this print came from accounts and photographic documentation of anti-Black violence in the United States published in the late 1960s, most notably two covers: (1) Truman Nelson’s book The Torture of Mothers (1968), which featured a Black mother’s profile, and (2) the photograph of twelve-year-old Joe Bass Jr.’s brutalized body on the July 28, 1967 cover of Life magazine. The resulting image is an emblem of Black motherhood that speaks to the intense fear and anxiety in the minds and lived realities of mothers raising children in an era of violence and police brutality. 

Other artists from this generation began to employ the new languages of postmodernism (performance, conceptualism, installation, media art) to capture the unseen or unspoken experiences of motherhood and their politics. American artist Mary Kelly’s landmark project Post-Partum Document (1973–79), in which she systematically recorded the everyday physical and psychological labor of raising her son, exemplifies this shift. Rather than depicting her maternal experience in a sentimental or symbolic way, Kelly approached it as both an intellectual and personal process, combining records of her son’s development with reflections on her own growing development as a mother. What results is the documentation of two subjectivities coming into being alongside one another. The complexity of this work, made in 139 objects spanning six sections, is difficult to distill for students all at once, and this video helps to highlight its key aspects and some individual sections that you can go into in further depth following the video to aid in discussion and understanding. The section Documentation I: Analysed Fecal Stains and Feeding Charts (aka the stained nappy liners) is an interesting element to show students, especially as it caused so much outrage in the press when it was originally shown at the ICA in London in 1976. Documentation VI: Pre-writing Alphabet Exergue and Diary draws upon students’ art historical knowledge in its symbolic reference to the Rosetta Stone. In Documentation III: Analysed Markings and Diary-Perspective Schema Kelly sets up transcripts of conversations with her child, her own internal responses, and later reflections. You might read through one example of this with students and point out to them that these texts are also overlaid with her son’s scribbles, a visual interruption to her research. By methodically documenting their intertwined lives, Kelly presents motherhood as analytical, scientific, and rigorously intellectual, yet also deeply personal and intimate.

Similarly foregrounding the often invisibilized experience of maternal labor, artist Lea Lublin also chose to make motherhood the physical material of her artistic practice. Lublin was born in Poland and raised in Argentina, but spent most of her adult life in Paris. She was invited to participate in the 24th Salon de Mai in Paris, and presented My Son (1968) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville. This installation-performance consisted of Lublin caring for her infant son, Nicholas, inside of the museum for several hours each day over the course of a week. By inserting the intimate, routine labors of breastfeeding, changing, and caregiving into the public sphere of the museum, Lublin collapsed the boundaries between art and life, private and public, and called into question the pressures facing working mothers. 

American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles was grappling with similar questions during this same year. After finishing art school in 1968, she had her first child and found herself at a crossroads, struggling with the seeming incompatibility of pursuing an art career while taking on the demands of domestic and maternal labor. She later said of this time, “I literally was divided in two. Half of my week I was the mother, and the other half the artist. But, I thought to myself, ‘this is ridiculous, I am the one.’” Her solution was to merge these two aspects of her life into one, turning the repetitive tasks of care labor into the basis of her artistic practice. She crystalized these ideas in her “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!” which formed the basis for her later performances where she documented herself conducting household chores in private and public spaces. Here is a video of Ukeles outlining her manifesto in further depth.

The Los Angeles–based art collective Mother Art also sought to confront the art world’s dismissal of maternal experience. The group initially emerged out of The Woman’s Building, a pioneering feminist art and education center that served as a hub for women to create, exhibit, and organize collectively outside of traditional, male-dominated art institutions. Despite its significance for feminist art, some students, like Suzanne Siegel, reflected: “Although it seems strange today, at the beginning of the Women’s Movement in the early seventies some feminists at the Woman’s Building considered being both a serious artist and mother to be in conflict.” Mother Art’s collaborative projects often merged consciousness-raising methods with performances and installations that foregrounded the daily realities of mothering and domestic labor. This can be seen in Laundry Works (1974), a series of performances in which the group transformed laundromats into temporary gallery spaces where each performance was timed to a wash and dry cycle, using the site of domestic maintenance as a stage for feminist art and activism. Mother Art’s practice also betrayed the isolation mothers often feel in their care labor, instead emphasizing solidarity among women and insisting that motherhood, far from being a private or marginal concern, was central to both feminist politics and artistic practice.

Another feminist art collective turned to performance to transform motherhood in Mexico during the 1980s. Polvo de Gallina Negra was founded in 1983 by artists Mónica Mayer and Maris Bustamante with the mission of creating artwork from feminist perspectives that would “[transform] the visual world in order to alter lived realities.” Their most ambitious project was ¡Madres! [Mothers!], a series of interventions that confronted cultural constructions of motherhood using humor, performance, and mass media tactics. The best-known performance from the project, Mother for a Day (1987), unfolded on the popular television program Nuestro mundo, where they asked the host to symbolically assume the role of “mother” for a day as they discussed some of the complexities of motherhood, particularly its unachievable ideals. You might show students portions from the video of the performance (with English subtitles) for discussion. It is helpful here to ask students to consider the specific choices made by these artists in creating the work. Why choose to perform on television rather than in a gallery? How might humor have been a strategy in this work and to what effect? What political implications does their transformation of a cis-man into a “mother for a day” have? How do you think audiences at home reacted to the performance? The mass-media context for the work allowed the artists to reach audiences far beyond the traditional art world, with an estimated 200 million viewers watching that day across Mexico, Latin America, and parts of the United States. This action also positioned feminist critique within everyday spaces, ideally prompting discussion in the domestic sphere. By satirically impregnating their host, the artists underscored the imbalance of labor demanded of women as mothers, while also more subtly exposing the ongoing need for women’s safe and legal access to abortion, as women were still barred from choosing not to be pregnant. 

Contemporary Art and the Politics of Motherhood (1990s – today)

It’s nice to start this section on more contemporary practices with a work that asserts the contemporary relevance of issues surrounding motherhood and art that began the lecture. With In Balance With (2012), American artist Courtney Kessel takes up many of the same questions about motherhood and art that artists were asking during the women’s movement forty years before. You can show students a portion of the video of Kessell’s collaborative performance with her daughter, Chloé, and while they are watching outline the context and key aspects of her performance. Kessell began the work as a single mother who was going back to school. She said of the work, “In partial protest, I am putting the mother in the gallery. She is not the idealized mother painted with glowing beams of light smiling down at her child, but the real, subjective, elated, grumpy, sexy, frustrated, proud mother who wishes to express herself in that space, not to be spoken for.” The rules of the performance are that Kessell must add items representative of their lives (Chloé’s toys, food, laundry, Kessel’s research books, etc) to Chloé’s side to achieve perfect balance between the two. The work must end when Chloé says she is ready to get down. After watching, ask students to share their reactions. Students often pick up on how playful, yet profound the work is in terms of bringing visible form to the concept of the “double shift” while also underscoring the way maternal labor is structured around the child’s, rather than the mother’s, needs. Students often respond well to the updated version of the project from 2020, where mother and daughter were able to sit together and share a conversation.  

American artist Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s Under Construction (2025) engages similar issues of maternal balance, here focusing on the artist’s effort to find equilibrium in her experiences as a pregnant woman. Datchuk dons compression garments and a conical hat as she holds bamboo scaffolding from which she suspends various objects related to her journey as an artist and mother: porcelain clocks, pregnancy tests, and sculptural objects. The bamboo structure, an allusion to her Chinese heritage, forms a cage around her pregnant body that simultaneously leaves her body exposed to the public and open to its scrutiny. Datchuk explains the work “emphasizes the often-invisible nature of maternal labor and its intersection with autonomy, vulnerability, and resistance.”

Other artists have turned to self-portraiture to represent the negotiations of contemporary maternal identity. Renée Cox’s Yo Mama series (1992–94) emerged from her experience as the first woman to be pregnant while participating in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Born in Jamaica and raised in New York City, Cox sought to create new, empowering representations of Black women that subverted ongoing racist and sexist stereotypes. Cox has said of the series, “I decided I’m going to give you pregnancy in your face—and that’s what I did. In other societies, women have allowed the males to dominate. I was like, No. Women are fucking strong. You make somebody in forty weeks; that’s pretty phenomenal. That’s the power of a woman.” Show students an image from the series, Yo Mama (1993), that was shown to wide acclaim in Marcia Tucker’s 1994 exhibition Bad Girls. Ask them to reflect on the choices made in creating this portrait and what ideas Cox wants the viewer to come away with regarding her version of motherhood. Here we see the artist as a strong, confident, and stylish mother, a woman who is simultaneously powerful and unapologetically sexual, as she holds her laughing 18-month-old son. You can also discuss her title for the series and how it subverts the “yo mama” joke tradition that intended to playfully exaggerate or insult someone’s mother (note your students might have no context for this). Yo Mama’s Pieta (1996) also provides a nice comparison to earlier objects in the lecture that engage with Christian iconography. Here Cox casts herself as a grieving Black mother mourning her child, alluding to histories of racial violence in the United States. You can further contextualize this work by discussing the context of racial violence in the 1990s, as this image was produced in the aftermath of the 1991 Rodney King beating, the 1992 Los Angeles uprisings, and the 1994 Crime Bill. Similar to Elizabeth Catlett’s work, this image situates Black motherhood as both a site of strength and of political mourning and anticipates the visual languages of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2003) provides a good point of connection with Renée Cox’s work in its reworking of traditional Christian iconography used here to assert the visibility of queer motherhood. A Los Angeles-based photographer active in leather and BDSM subcultures, Opie has long been interested in how images can challenge cultural perceptions, particularly around aspects of queer life. After participating in the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights, Opie became increasingly aware of her own marginalization and stigmatization within both mainstream and queer communities, and she began to create portraits that drew on Baroque art historical references to render herself and her peers in a beautiful, regal, and dignified manner. Here it would be useful to show students a prior work, Self-Portrait/Pervert (1994), where Opie documented the cutting of the word “pervert” into her chest. Taken ten years later, Self Self-Portrait/Nursing continues this tradition, now with Opie depicting herself breastfeeding her son. Students will notice the scars of this earlier photograph still visible on Opie’s chest, linking her past with her present experience of motherhood. By placing herself within a lineage of fine art and religious imagery, Opie both honors and disrupts those traditions, filling the gap in visual culture where queer mothers had been almost entirely absent. 

Wendy Red Star’s series Apsáalooke Feminist (2016) (see above), a series of four photographs, similarly brings issues related to intersectionality, maternal experience, and the politics of visibility. Created during her residency at the Denver Art Museum with her daughter, Beatrice, these staged portraits engage directly with objects from the museum’s collection. Mother and daughter are dressed in elk tooth dresses, what Red Star describes as the epitome of Apsáalooke/Crow culture, and surrounded by bright colors and objects from the intuition’s holdings. The emphasis on color was a strategic response to historic photographs of Indigenous peoples, which not only often centered on men, but erased the vibrancy of Indigenous objects in their black and white record. With this image, Red Star also asserts the matrilineal structure of the Crow Nation, shown in the mirroring of mother and daughter in their attitudes and stances, embodying the passing on of cultural knowledge and resilience across generations. Its title highlights the irony of the Westernized concept of feminism, which often excludes Indigenous voices, when Indigenous communities have often positioned women’s voices at the center of society.

Guatemalan artist Regina José Galindo’s work, America‘s Family Prison (2008), provides a way to connect the aesthetic of maternal care with contemporary political issues. This work engages directly with immigration politics in the United States and the inhumanity of the private-prison industry. For this work, Galindo rented a prison cell typically used to detain families while their immigration status was determined, and transported it to the Artpace Gallery in San Antonio, Texas. The performance/installation was designed in reaction to the recent construction of the T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Taylor, TX, the first prison authorized by the state to lodge families, including pregnant women, adolescents, children, and babies. Galindo and her partner lived in the prison cell with their two-year old daughter for a period of 36 hours. During the performance, visitors were allowed to peer in through a viewing window, observing Galindo and her husband performing care labor for each other and their daughter. The cell was then left on view in the gallery for a period of two months after the performance was over. This voyeuristic quality of the work implicates viewers in the dehumanization of mothers and children caught in border-control systems, a reality often kept hidden from public view. It also raises pertinent ethical questions regarding the use of art to reenact systems of suffering and the potential limits for artworks to generate spaces of empathy or accountability for audiences.

It is fitting to conclude the section with British artist Lenka Clayton’s An Artist Residency in Motherhood (2012–ongoing) as it shifts from representation to action. Clayton developed the project after she became a mother and found herself excluded from traditional artist residencies. Instead of leaving home, Clayton reframed her daily life with children as the site of a residency, setting rules, schedules, and goals for making art within the constraints of caregiving. Example of work creating during her residency are The Distance I Can Be From My Son (2013), where Clayton measured how far she felt able to allow her son to stray away from her in different environments; or the installation Mother’s Days (2012–14), which was a collection of 100 written accounts of a day in the life of 100 mothers (from midnight to midnight) around the world. These daily accounts were later recreated at the Pittsburg Center for the Arts, where three mothers read three concurrent accounts throughout the day, their stories blurring together at various points. Clayton formalized her residency into an open model that other artists who were mothers could adapt no matter where they were in the world. This project highlights the struggles and possibilities of combining motherhood with artmaking, turning the challenges of care into the formal material and structure of creative practice. There are now over 1,200 artists participating in Clayton’s An Artist Residency in Motherhood across the world (you can reference a map here).

Art and Reproductive Freedom

This final section addresses art and reproductive freedom, a topic that resonates strongly with undergraduate audiences, but can also surface difficult and complicated emotions. I recommend providing students with a warning regarding this content prior to the day’s lesson and being transparent with students as to why this material is critical to discuss. You might have an open-ended discussion regarding what we lose when avoiding these topics in courses focused on issues related to gender and/or women’s experiences in art.

As mentioned earlier in the lecture, works related to the experience of not becoming a mother have been incredibly rare in the history of art. You can return to Frida Kahlo’s work, and her drawing The Abortion (Frida and the Miscarriage) (1932), from which six lithographs have been produced. Kahlo never titled the drawing, but it has since been referred to by scholars as either “The Abortion” or “The Miscarriage.” These titles emerged in the 1980s from interpretations by the artists’ biographers who sought to determine the cause of Kahlo’s pregnancy loss in 1932. The ambiguity in titling draws to the fore the ongoing complexities of reproductive freedom, namely in the stigmatized language surrounding pregnancy loss (a “miscarriage” is a “spontaneous abortion”) and the possibility that Kahlo may have elected to end a pregnancy while she was in Detroit with her husband, the artist Diego Rivera, which was illegal at the time. You can ask students to reflect on the different titles and how each alters the way we respond to the work and ethical concerns they raise. Lisa John Rogers’ report on the “graphic imagery” warning sign placed outside the gallery displaying this work at the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts provides a useful entry point for discussing the policing of women’s maternal and non-maternal experiences. 

 

American artist Juanita McNeely is one of the few artists to explicitly address the silence surrounding illegal abortions. Her nine-panel painting, Is it Real? Yes it is!, (1969), forced audiences to confront the intensity of her own experience obtaining an abortion in 1967. She had been diagnosed with cancer and her doctors were unable to treat her because she had recently become pregnant. This short video is a good way to introduce the painting to students. It was created just before McNeely’s death in 2023 and includes her own reflections on the work. You might ask students to compare her images with Kahlo’s to consider how artists continued to use personal experiences to speak to wider issues and political concerns. It is also interesting to consider that the painting was not acquired by an institution until 2023, a situation McNeely’s ascribed to society’s aversion to depictions of women’s trauma. 

Art has played a role in the ongoing public fight for reproductive freedom around the world. Barbara Kruger and the collective the Guerilla Girls utilized mass media tactics to create posters and postcards that have been utilized in protests across the United States since the 1980s. Rather than depicting personal experiences, these works focused on text and historical data to critique women’s lack of bodily autonomy. Portuguese artist Paula Rego’s Abortion Series (1998) was created in response to a referendum on legalizing abortion in the country, which had failed after only 35 percent of the population turned out to vote. Rego was enraged by the hypocrisy of this result as she knew how common it was for women to seek out underground abortions and their often-deadly consequences. She created this series of pastel paintings as a form of protest. The paintings depict young women, often schoolgirls, in everyday settings rather than hospitals, surrounded by the familiar trappings of daily life as they go through the process of an at-home abortion. You can ask students to respond to the ways Rego is choosing to show these women. Without sensationalism or blood, her images are clinical and frank; yet they remain unsettling in their realism. The artist insisted that the women in her paintings were not victims. She wanted to reject narratives of shame and instead allow for the then-radical notion that it is possible to have an abortion without guilt. Nearly a decade later, her works were used to support another referendum and credited with contributing to the legalization of abortion in Portugal in 2007.

To bring the lesson into the twenty-first century, you might discuss efforts on the part of artists and organizers to make these messages more widespread through recent public artistic actions. This video showcases the 2020 exhibition Abortion is Normal organized in New York City to destigmatize and raise awareness for reproductive rights. The recent installation Trigger Planting (2022) was created by the art collective How to Perform an Abortion in reaction to leaked Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Presented at Frieze New York in collaboration with A.I.R. Gallery and National Women’s Liberation, the work uses a large map of the United States with pockets planted with herbs that have historically been used for contraception and abortion placed over the 26 states projected to ban abortion. The work makes lost histories of reproductive care visible, asserting that herbal medicine and self-managed abortion have long been a part of women’s health. It connects this history of knowledge regarding bodily autonomy to the current legal landscape threatening reproductive freedom, while artistically engaging with public forms to challenge stigma and mobilize broader awareness. You might ask students to compare this work to Rego’s series, in that they both address abortion without depicting the procedure directly to try and directly affect political change. What might be the impact of these different strategies on how viewers understand and engage with the subject of abortion?

To conclude you might ask students to return to the questions that foregrounded this lecture and compare how artists have rejected the notion of motherhood as a distraction from artistic practice and transform it into a subject and material of art itself. This is often aided by asking students to share which works resonated with them the most. You might remind students that in addition to their transformation of dominant constructions of motherhood, these artists were also at the forefront of developing new artistic strategies and forms, such as conceptualism, performance, installation, and new media art. In challenging the art world’s exclusion of motherhood, they were also part of the invention of artistic practice, essentially reframing motherhood as a site of political, intellectual, and artistic inquiry. 

Suggestions for Engaged Activities

• As a follow-up activity, students can visit a local museum, gallery, or online collection to examine how motherhood is represented (or overlooked!) in artworks on view. Working in small groups, ask students to identify artworks that depict mothers, maternal figures, or representations of care, and create a maternal highlights tour that places these works in dialogue with the artists and themes discussed in class. In addition to asking their tour to analyze how motherhood is constructed in the museum, you might ask them to suggest ways of re-curating the galleries with comparative works from the lecture that reframe or complicate these representations.
• Inspired by Lenka Clayton’s Mother’s Days, you can assign students a project where they work together to create a collective portrait of motherhood through the collection of narratives. Each student will gather a written account of a day in the life of a mother in their own network: a parent, relative, friend, or community member. Students will ask them to document a single day in their life, from midnight to midnight. You may also choose a shorter time frame that fits within the confines of a school day or the time in which you will perform the accounts. Students will send you these collected, anonymized accounts that you will compile and print out. You may hang them up in the classroom or in a more public area (but be aware that work done outside of the context of the classroom may be subject to IRB scrutiny). Plan a day in which students will read the accounts from the same time frame aloud simultaneously, so that different voices and experiences overlap and converge. The performance can be repeated in rounds to allow for different combinations of stories, and you can pursue doing the performance in a more public forum (but again, be aware of potential IRB scrutiny). Afterward, discuss with the class what emerged from collecting these accounts and witnessing this layering of voices.
• Drawing from Trigger Planting (2022), students can collaboratively create a map of local reproductive freedom resources that highlights clinics, advocacy groups, community health organizations, and other spaces connected to reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, or maternal health in their area. Working in small groups, they can research and plot these resources on a shared map (digital or physical), annotating each location with brief notes on its role, history, or services. Once complete, you can discuss what the map reveals as a group. For example, are there any gaps in resources and/or accessibility? How does the map connect with broader political debates? You can also reflect the role art might play in enhancing this landscape.