THE ROUND-UP: Motherhood Didn’t End Their Art—It Transformed It
Great art inspired by care
This summer I got to see some really good art by moms who were inspired by their experiences as mothers to different and fascinating effects. Together, their work serves as all the evidence we need that women can be artists and mothers—though they do need support! It also confirms that caregiving illuminates provocative and textured truths about selfhood and our infinite capacity, and infinite struggle, to connect with others.
1. Ruth Asawa: Retrospective
April 5–September 2, 2025
SF MOMA
If you live in the Bay Area, you have likely heard about, or seen, the Ruth Asawa retrospective at SF MOMA. Asawa was a mother of six who rejected the male solitary artistic genius ideal by putting her studio in her living room where her six kids also hung out. (No, this set-up wouldn’t work for everyone—I certainly couldn’t write in a room full of kids—but it did for Asawa and I welcome it with open arms as part of a vision of creativity and artistic practice.)
The retrospective includes a gallery that was recreated to resemble this living room, which was originally located in a cathedral-like space in a house in San Francisco. One of the wall texts mentioned how she liked working there because when the kids came home from school she could easily stop and tend to them.
“I’ve always had my studio in the house because I wanted my children to understand what I do and I wanted to be there if they needed me—or a peanut butter sandwich.”
The peanut butter sandwich reference quickly had me thinking about Betty Friedan’s opening to the The Feminine Mystique:
“As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—'Is this all?'”
And then I thought about how I’m so glad we have both of these visions of peanut-butter sandwich making; Frieden articulated the boredom and frustration, and Asawa expressed the tenderness and grace of making comforting food for someone you love. Also, Asawa’s sandwiches were prepared within a broader context that allowed for her own authentic self-expression and I suspect that made all the difference. (Takeaway: making sandwiches for our children isn’t an inherently miserable experience, but the conditions in which we make them matter.)
Now back to Asawa. She was known for incorporating motherhood and care into her whole process, from the way she related to other artists, to her involving children in the creation of public art. But what was most compelling to me was the presence of care—as an idea and a practice—in her abstract sculptures.
They’re both delicate and strong, a million little wires woven together to create something soft and fluid; round like a child’s cheek, round like a mother’s belly, round like the bend of a father’s back when he’s carrying a sleeping child. Unlike other large sculptures that sit on the floor, propelled upwards by the thrust of gravity, hers are suspended from the ceiling where they gently sway for viewers. The result feels as ephemeral and nurturing as gazing up at clouds who whisper back: “There you are. Here we are. There you go. Here we go.”
Read more about Asawa and her mother-artist identity here.
2. MAINTENANCE ARTIST
A documentary directed, produced and written by Toby Perl Freilich about artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles
This summer at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival I got to see a fantastic documentary about the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who found a way to turn the ongoing nature of maintenance work, including care or cleaning, into art. (I also got to hang out with the filmmaker, Toby, who is wonderful and brilliant.)
Here is a description of the film:
“After the Revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?” challenged Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Crashing the boundary between art and action, in 1977 she became the first artist-in-residence at NYC’s Department of Sanitation, collaborating with municipal workers to inject art directly into the city’s bloodstream.
MAINTENANCE ARTIST is the first feature documentary about this trailblazing public artist and revolutionary force in contemporary art. Ukeles, inspired by Marcel Duchamp, pioneered the notion that routine maintenance – from changing diapers to picking up city trash to caring for the earth – could be acts of performance works. With never-before-seen archival footage, MAINTENANCE ARTIST tells a stirring story of essential workers and radical contemporary art set during the social and artistic upheavals of the last half century. Penetrating, provocative, funny, and deeply moving, MAINTENANCE ARTIST fills a glaring cultural gap and heralds Ukeles’ call for a Maintenance Revolution.
I appreciated the way Ukeles’ work connects the dots between all types of maintenance work, including the type traditionally done by women in the domestic sphere and the type usually done by working class men (janitorial work, garbage collecting, etc.) in the public sphere. How do we find ways to see and value all the work that will never be finished? The cooking and cleaning and schlepping and mending and shopping for basic necessities? (I’ve done all of these already today.) And how can we do that without overly romanticizing the work? Ukeles’ way through this was to draw attention to the people doing the work, imbuing dignity by way of acknowledgment.
Back in 2016, Ukeles told the New York Times that her work was a response to the way the New York art world turned on her after she became a mom.
She was stunned to discover (“I was so naïve”) that becoming a mother “instantly made me into a different class of human being.”
“People stopped asking me questions, stopped thinking of me as anything other than a mother,” she said. “I was in a crisis because I had worked years to be an artist, and I didn’t want to be two people. It seemed like I could be an artist only by being two people.” And so she sat down and in a single session typed a cri de coeur — “Manifesto for Maintenance Art 1969!” — that became a touchstone of conceptual and performance art, questioning not only gender and class in the art world but the foundations of the avant-garde itself.
I’ll leave you with the opening line to her manifesto entitled CARE:
“I am an artist. I am a woman. I am a wife. I am a mother (random order). I do a hell of a lot of washing, cleaning, cooking, renewing, supporting, preserving, etc. Also, (up to now separately) I 'do' Art. Now, I will simply do these maintenance everyday things, and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them as Art.”
The film has a few more showings on the festival circuit this year. In the meantime, dig into Mierle! And here. And maybe make some maintenance art of your own.
3. “Recast: Vanessa Woods”
Filter/Space, 1821 West Hubbard
May 2nd – June 21st, 2025
Okay, so this one I didn’t actually get to go to, because it was in Chicago and I didn’t come anywhere close to the Midwest this summer. But I have been a huge fan of Vanessa Woods for so long, and I spent a lot of time with these images on my computer, so I decided it qualified for this list.
As I’ve said many times before, what I want most in the world is for creative work that avoids a presentation of motherhood that feels like a fairy tale or a nightmare. My favorite works about motherhood, and any care relationship in general, explore the messy middle—the sometimes productive, sometimes destructive friction at the heart of all true intimacy. The feeling of belonging laced with loneliness; the deep, soft breaths, the gasps for air; the big bush of roses, but be careful of its thorns. Our relational selves, our relational truths, are not products of ease; this does not make them any less valuable.
Woods’ works connect all these dots for me. She captures the whole big paradox, the whole big mess, of feeling tethered to someone who depends on you. While her images are static, they feel as though they are in motion. The collages create the effect of body parts assembling and reassembling themselves before your eyes, capturing the ongoing, unstable nature of motherhood that portraits of babies sitting still on mothers’ laps (the most common historical representation of motherhood in art) never reveal. Care is change. Constant change. I might understand that intellectually, but Woods’ art delivers that truth to some place deep in my psyche.
Read more about her show here. And follow her on Instagram here.
How amazing are these?
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I stood in that Asawa gallery with the huge photo of her living room utterly spellbound. It spoke to me! I think of the writing I was doing when my kids were young. Much of it felt “failed” because I couldn’t get it published. But I was making it in their presence, entirely inspired by them, and that gave it a vibrancy. I’m using fragments of it in my current work—feels good to use the “failed” stuff—and people always comment on those sections and their aliveness. Which is all to say, kids really can feed art. I crave examples of it, like these you’ve shared. Thank you!
three new artists for me to appreciate! I really loved how their works showcase just how creatively inspired mothers are.