The Brooklyn Rail

A woman gazes down at a small baby, nursing peacefully at her breast. She sits on a simple chair against a background of draped damask cloth. At first glance, it resembles familiar historic portraits of the Madonna and child that line room after room of Western museums. But instead of a luminous, blue-swathed virgin, this mother has cropped hair, tattoos, and faint scars across her bare chest spelling out the word “PERVERT.”

Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004) is a tender image of a woman who is butch, lesbian, a mother, and an artist, defying stereotypes of maternity while simultaneously recognizing that motherhood—with its attendant highs and lows—is a widely shared experience. By turning the camera on herself, Opie interrogates both how motherhood is presented in visual culture and what it means to be an artist mother.

This beautiful artwork is emblematic of the approach taken by writer and curator Hettie Judah in her new book Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood, which explores representations of motherhood, the cultural invisibility of the realities of maternity, and the position of the artist mother. Or, as Judah asks in her opening chapter, “how might we see the mother differently when motherhood is not only the subject of an artwork but the circumstances of its creation?”

Like so many spheres, the art world is not set up to accommodate primary caregivers: gaps or shifts in output are frowned upon; maternity leave for the self-employed can be financially ruinous; few spaces offer childcare or breastfeeding rooms; and residencies or exhibitions abroad become a logistical nightmare. These are topics extensively covered in Judah’s previous book, How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (And Other Parents) (2022).

The systemic challenges of being an artist mother contextualize Judah’s broader interrogation of maternity and art in this new book. Judah begins with a survey of representations of motherhood, from forty-thousand-year-old stone carvings (which can be read as self-portraits of pregnant women) to the Renaissance ideal of the Madonna and Child that still pervades cultural understandings of maternity. It offers a wide-ranging tour of the types of both art and maternity valued by different societies, and the paradigms by which mothers are judged.

Judah then goes on to explore how these paradigms have been internalized, challenged, and rewritten by artist mothers through representations of birth, childcare, and loss. This includes several analyses of artists whose works are not usually considered in the context of maternity, such as Artemisia Gentileschi who, as well as famously taking a man to court for rape, also gave birth to four children in the six years after she married at age nineteen—three of whom died. Knowing about these experiences provides a far more nuanced context for Gentileschi’s paintings, beyond what Judah describes as the dominant “girlboss feminism” narrative of Gentileschi as “a violated woman with a taste for bloody revenge.”

As with Opie’s iconic self-portrait, throughout these chapters tenderness and brashness are powerfully juxtaposed. In the work of many of these artists, the intensity of familial love presses hard against the drudgery of washing, cleaning, and feeding, all shot through by the specters of abuse or abandonment. For instance, Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s picture album, Maintenance Art Tasks (1973), records the repetitive actions of childcare, transforming “maintenance” into art—and also into love for her children, whose solemn faces gaze out from the pages.

Judah writes of loss expansively, encompassing miscarriage, stillbirth, obstetric violence, and infertility. “This is the chapter you don’t want to read,” she writes in the section on loss. “This is the chapter I didn’t want to write.” And yet it feels vitally important that this chapter was written—and that we read it. For instance, Elina Brotherus’s photographic series Annonciation (2009–13) tracks the cycles of her life, from the blooming of flowers to the routine of working life. Within this, she also charts rounds of (ultimately unsuccessful) IVF treatments, including scenes where she injects herself with fertility drugs, sits daydreaming about a future child, and repeatedly discards negative pregnancy tests. Judah notes that the work is presented as a critical counterbalance to the teleological happy narrative represented in advertisements for fertility treatments. Instead, Brotherus shows a reality that many face.

Throughout Acts of Creation, Judah takes a refreshingly expansive approach to definitions of motherhood, family, and artistic practice. A chapter dedicated to “the family reborn” explores alternative modes of familial life that look beyond the bounds of heteronormativity, versions of motherhood that are often excluded from such surveys. Judah looks at Cathy Cade’s Emerson Street Household, Berkeley, CA (1973), a photographic portrait of Cade’s family group, made up of herself, her friend Pat, her lover Kate, and Kate’s young son. The specifics of the group fluctuated over the next few years, forging an unconventional set-up of collective lesbian mothering that influenced Cade’s creative practice and prompted her to find ways of sharing common experiences.

Judah quotes Cade saying: “It was very important to have a place where you could… learn that there are other people having similar problems or successes.” This sentiment could equally apply to art-making and mothering; and this double applicability suggests the ways in which these conditions are entwined for so many artist mothers.

In charting such a broad range of both art and mothers, Judah’s book offers itself up as one of these shared spaces, as well as offering a fresh take on motherhood as a fruitful condition of radical praxis.