The subject of motherhood is urgent in today’s political climate. It’s implicit in the separation of families at the American border, political figures giving birth while serving in office, the ongoing discrimination against mothers in the workplace, and the endless challenges to laws that allow women to maintain control of their bodies.
Women artists have long questioned the choice of becoming a mother for the sake of career. Within art history, images of motherhood have traditionally been romanticized, and aspects of motherhood have largely been marginalized or absent from mainstream contemporary art.
Mother, an exhibition on view at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects, explores the complexity of women’s relationships to motherhood through a variety of approaches. Among the works on view are:
The Mom Tapes (1974–78), the highly acclaimed, darkly comic exposition of a mother/daughter relationship by the pioneering video artist Ilene Segalove; Mom Dyeing Eyebrows, a large black & white photograph from Marilyn Minter’s Coral Ridge Towers series (1969/1995), depicting the solitude and aging glamour of the artist’s mother; White Ink, a new piece by Carmen Winant, whose standout installation, My Birth, consisting of 2,000 found photographs of women giving birth, was recently on view in Being: New Photography 2018, at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The opposite of looking is not invisibility. The opposite of yellow is not gold(2016) by Hồng-Ân Trương & Hương Ngô, also recently on view at The Museum of Modern Art; Yoko Ono’s photographic work on canvas, My Mommy is Beautiful (1997), new photographs by Patty Chang delineating her global fears and those specifically for the future of her son, and Antepartum (1973), a film by Mary Kelly that anticipates her landmark work, Post-Partum Document (1973–79), a six-year exploration of the mother-child relationship.
The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with Laurel Nakadate,whose exhibition, The Kingdom, which focused on the birth of her son and the loss of her mother, took place earlier this year at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects.
Mother
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
Through October 27, 2018
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