I spent a lot of time traveling last month. With someone else watching my kids 3000 miles away, I had free time, and with that free time I went to art museums.
I saw three shows, featuring work spanning over 500 years, and they all had me thinking a lot about motherhood and care, and representations of motherhood and care.
ONE: Mary Cassatt
An American in Paris
National Gallery
Through 8/30/2026
Cassatt was an American-born artist who, in 1874 at age 30, permanently moved to Paris where she worked among the Impressionists. She is known for her portraits of mothers and children which are filled with psychological depth, the chaos of daily life, and politics. This work upended Victorian ideals of maternity and domesticity as simple, sweet, seamless and pure.
Some contemporary critics try to rescue Cassatt from being perceived as sentimental—because apparently there is no higher praise for any woman creator than being called unsentimental. Grr, and I don’t buy that. I think Cassatt didn’t avoid sentiment, but instead saw it with unusual clarity and then managed to capture that clarity in her work.
Here in The Boating Party we have a scene that is recognizable. First, we see a gendered division of labor that doesn’t seem to make anyone too happy. He (perhaps a fisherman based on his clothes, but also maybe the father) is responsible for making the boat go, she is responsible for looking nice and keeping the child content. None seem to be convinced that this seemingly leisurely boat trip was worth the effort. And yet, mother and child, connected in their embodied messy humanity, look at the man/maybe father in an attempt to connect with him. And isn’t that really the best any of us can do on the imperfect boat rides of our lives?
Meet Little Girl in a Blue Armchair. Are you not in love?
I mostly want to say nothing and just leave this girl, in her own thoughts, in a chaotic domestic scene, her clothes as disorderly as the arrangement of the chairs, the sleeping dog somehow her partner-in-thought, right here without further comment.
But I can’t but help but draw your attention to the way Cassatt captures the inner life of a child, a girl who seems to be a little bored, a little pouty, a little remorseful—all at the same time. And remember, when we give children rich inner lives, we are raising up the work of those who care for them, because caring for small beings with rich inner lives is hard work!
In Woman with a Sunflower we have a mom help a girl see her own image, while both of their images are reflected back to them in the mirror. Mom is wearing a sunflower, a symbol of the suffrage movement, and it features as prominently as the daughter’s face in the painting. My take? Motherhood and politics are not separate. Fighting for the right to vote impacts both the kind of mom this woman can be, and the kind of person she hopes her daughter sees in the mirror: someone whose voice matters in the electorate and halls of political power as well as at home.
TWO: Carol Bove
The Guggenheim Museum
Through 8/02/2026
Carol Bove is a contemporary sculptor. Her work is abstract, large-scale, and made mostly from rigid materials, and yet, as if by magic, somehow imbued with human-grade levels of vulnerability.
In the show there are many pieces like these: steel twisted, shaped, colored and textured into forms that upend our ideas about what is solid and what isn’t. Here, the metal becomes sensitive, alive, soft, and susceptible. There is a playfulness to them, but also an almost melancholy or exhaustion. These sculptures upend our ideas that anything is eternally strong and stable. And there is relief in that.
And it wasn’t just the sculptures that made this point. Bove also took aim at how museums were designed in a way that didn’t take the sensitivity and fragility of our bodies into consideration and she made some interventions.
For one, there was a tactile room where one could touch all the materials she used. This tells us that she understands that touch is an important part of an encounter, and she did her best to make that possible without potentially harming her work.
My favorite intervention was the beds she placed all over where people could sit and lie down and reflect. “Museums are so off-putting,” Bove told the New York Times. “I think it goes all the way back to Plato, who believed the body was really inferior to the soul.” To be welcomed as a person with a body, and a body that gets tired, during a large-scale museum show doesn’t merely translate to rest. It changes the way you experience art, bodies in space encountering other bodies (sculptures) in space. I hope more museums consider beds in galleries!
THREE: Raphael: Sublime Poetry
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Through 6/28/26
So of course I have heard of Raphael, one of the Italian Renaissance masters/ namesake of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. What I didn’t know, until I saw this show, is that his work was key in changing the way the Virgin Mary was painted. Up until that time, she was most often portrayed as a symbol, distant, solemn and sacred, and without much interiority.
Raphael did something different with her. He made her intimate, conflicted, contemplative and alive, someone who was very much in the moment with her baby, but also at the same time transcendent. These portraits of Mary moved me, as they capture all the simultaneous hope and fear all moms experience in the presence of their children. We feel her dignity and the tragedy all at once, as she seems to hold on tighter in preparation of letting go. (Hello, motherhood.)
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Really lovely. Thanks so much for sharing these. ❤️
Very much wish I could see this Mary Cassatt exhibit! I had never seen the Woman with a Sunflower painting before, but I am in love. Partly for its history and tenderness and also because the toddler in it looks uncannily like my own three year-old. 💛Thank you for sharing this lovely experience!