Artist-Mother (Reshaping the Self, the Studio, and the World)

How the role of the artist-mother transforms how we think about being an artist and making art, and why this change matters now more than ever.

A personal and candid journey through art history—the perfect gift book for any artist-mother.

What does it mean to be an artist-mother, and why does it matter?

Art and motherhood have long been a taboo combination, if not a career-ender, but in recent years, a profound cultural shift has taken place. Many contemporary artists—as well as writers, poets, filmmakers, and other creative practitioners—now make mothering the subject of their work, as well as its condition. In Artist-Mother, Tara McDowell argues that   the artist-mother reimagines what we understand an artist to be, while making the maternal experience visible. In doing so, these artists produce art, and an artistic subject, in which relationships are central.

The author posits that this model—the artist-mother as a form of relation rather than as a fixed identity—is one from which we can learn much in this moment of climate catastrophe, individual alienation, and the erosion of social and communal bonds.

Each chapter of the book—on Tala Madani, Camille Henrot, Moyra Davey, Simone Leigh, and d harding and Kate Harding—offers a close reading of a contemporary artist’s work, which becomes a lens onto a rich intersection of artmaking and mothering, illuminating new and long-needed models for art history. The author covers a range of artistic media, from painting to photography to video to sculpture, and a variety of topics around motherhood, including abortion, miscarriage, postpartum depression, maternal ambivalence, collective mothering, and Indigenous matriarchy. Building on a long overdue if growing canon of work, McDowell delivers not only the definitive study of contemporary artist-mothers, she models an unflinchingly fresh form of art history in the making.