Tuan Andrew Nguyen
Trevor Paglen
Tabita Rezaire

Fruits of Labor — Reframing Motherhood andArtmaking

12

Fruits of Labor —Beatrice GlowRenée GreenDeborah Jack

Reframing Motherhoodand Artmaking
Curated by Bruna Shapira
Ashley January
Koyoltzintli
Graziela KunschAnna Maria Maiolino
Katya Meykson
Ahna Serendren
Sara ShaoulGabriela Vaisencher

June- JulyA.
31,Miller2022
curatedby3 Mae

A Thousand Secrets

Cover image: Ahna Serendren, Swell, 2022, Acrylic, oil, sand and charcoal on canvas, 20 in. × 16 in. (detail)apexart © 2023
ISBN: 978-1-946416-62-9

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November 3 - December 23, 2023

apexartNearly 50 years after second-wave feminism, mothers
remain guilty and isolated. “Motherhood, it could
be said, is the unfinished business of feminism”
argues thinker Andrea O’Reilly. The institution ofmotherhood is particularly oppressive in the UnitedStates, where public policies to support families arevirtually nonexistent. Among the wealthiest nationsin the world, the US is at the absolute bottom, withno national paid leave or universal access to childcare,
per an Unicef report. Art world’s barriers mirror
society at large, and maternity has been framed asa burden. Fruits of Labor — Reframing Motherhoodand Artmaking calls for a paradigm shift: it’s not
mothering that is incompatible with artmaking but
prevailing narratives defining women, caregiving, andartistic expression.

Fruits of Labor — Reframing Motherhood andArtmaking brings together a group of artists who
unpack the vastly personal yet universal experiencesof mothering. Encompassing multiple mediums, theexhibition explores the myriad of ways in which thesubject appears in artists’ practice, as a mode ofwork and being. Coming from the trenches of earlymotherhood, they juggle the pressing demands ofcaregiving and making art, not in solitude, but in thedomestic space. Their work showcases the rhythms ofmothering — the interrupted, fragmented focus, thenap-length studio time, the lack of resources, the timethat both drags on and moves frantically — and how
this rhythm unfolds into creative practice.

Katya Meykson, Untitled, 2020, Velvet and cotton thread, 12 in. × 14 in.

A poetics of interruption and negotiation
As a foreign new mother in the US, many standardpractices, like consumerism-fueled “rituals” andmedical care, struck me as outlandish or downrightoutrageous. Isolated, I turned to Art History. From theVenus of Millendorf to Madonnas and Impressionist
chubby babies, I excavated an iconography of birth andmotherhood — a creative survival strategy. Eventually,
this research evolved to contemporary artists. Theworks I was most drawn to had a common thread:their artists embraced the limitations of family life asa valid work mode. I had a concept for an exhibition.
Inspired by them, I would let the seismic shifts I wasexperiencing guide my curatorial methods.
Discussing Bracha L. Ettinger’s body of work, art
historian Griselda Pollock articulates the maternal
subjectivity as “a matrix for other logics, for ethics,
for aesthetics, for poetics, and even for social
relations perhaps.” Pregnancy, infertility and earlymotherhood are times of ambivalence and upheaval,
joy and disappointment, sheer exhaustion and astruggle to reclaim a sense of self. As the artists onview exemplify, caregiving can also mean inspiration
for major breakthroughs in one’s career.
3apexart - nyc
apexart - nycSara Shaoul, Belly, 2019, Baby monitor filmed with video camera, 1’02’’

The metamorphosis of self is the subject of Sara
Shaoul’s Belly (2019). Drawing on Mary Kelly’s
Antepartum (1973) and sci-fi tropes of mysterious
gestation, otherness, escape and arrival, as well aswatching her son through the baby monitor — anexperience at once soothing and anxiety-inducing

was given agency in the process and survived (2021), thetitle alludes to ways out of the patriarchal systems thatminimize women’s pain and violate their experience.

Ashley January, She was given agency in the process and survived, 2021, Oil and acrylic onlinen, 24 in. × 36 in.

— the video shows the artist in her child’s nursery,
massaging what is left from her pregnant abdomen.
With the blurred effect of a baby camera, the images
give a glimpse of the startling physical realities of earlymotherhood and underscore the profound shifts inidentity and perception that come with it.
An economy of means is also the case for Katya
Meykson, who creates textile sculptures that nod
to transitional objects. A painter by training, sheswitched mediums for practicality after childbirth.
Working in the evenings, after a day of juggling
childcare and teaching jobs, she uses embroidery
techniques to reconfigure shapes out of old fabrics
and materials found around the house, transforming
them into talismanic, tactile sculptures. Small, easilytransportable, her work is art at a domestic scale thatis historically associated with women. “They also fit
in the suitcase of the immigrant artist,” she jokes,
referring to her family history of asylum from theformer USSR.
Mother as a muse
Grappling with a traumatic delivery, and a near-deathexperience due to preeclampsia, Ashley January
redefines one of the most enduring Art History’s
motifs — the mother and child. Painting fellow
Black mothers, survivors of pregnancy and birthcomplications, and their children, she addresses theAmerican maternal mortality crisis – more than 80% ofpregnancy-related deaths in the U.S. are preventable,and Black women are three times more likely to diethan white women. January’s paintings are much
more than mere factual records, though. Everyday
rituals of care are rendered in scenes that brim withwarmth and resistance — for her, Black mothering isa political act against intersecting inequalities. In She

Inspired by the approach of Hungarian pediatrician
Emmi Pikler (1902–1984), which is based on self-initiatedplay, autonomy and respectful care, Graziela Kunschcreated Public Daycare, a space for children aged 0 to
3 years and their caregivers. Originally presented at
the Documenta-15, in 2022, this iteration was adapted
to apexart’s space and received a new name — Small
Public Daycare. apex’s version has a play area and achanging table, as well as archival images by Hungarianphotographer Marian Reismann. Reismann begancollaborating with Pikler in the 1930s, and set a standard
for children’s photography, which favored spontaneity.
Kunsch invites us to slow down, daring to imagine aworld in which caregiving is society’s collective project,
one that regrettably came to be seen as naturally female,therefore, invisible and undervalued but is rather “highlyskilled work that is essential, creative and influential” .
4Play and spontaneity, values learned from caregiving
even before she had a child, are also part of Koyoltzintli’s
practice. Images of In the Mouth of the Mountain
Jaguar Everybody is a Dancing Hummingbird (2019) aresaturated with magical realism, and the boundaries
between conscious and unconscious are porous.
Rooted in Amerindian mythology, the series MEDA
(2019) records the movements of a two million year
old woman, our primal ancestor, from which all otherliving things emerge. In Gathering Roots and Holding

up the Mirror, she captures naked bodies of women,
their skin in contact with the landscape, pointing to ourintersectionality with the earth. Time and memory —personal and collective, current and ancient — are alsopart of this topography.
Mothering-informed gestures
Ahna Serendren had to take a hiatus from her studiopractice to care for her daughter during the pandemic.
With parks and museums closed, they made regularpilgrimages to the beaches near their home. At night,Serendren experimented with mixing sand collectedby them into paint to create textural reliefs. She theninvited her daughter into her process. They painted onlarge swaths of loose canvas laid out in their backyard
using non-traditional tools — mops, hoses and waterballoons — which freed them up to make energetic,
bodily gestures and to keep the process playful. Working
with a toddler, she had to be open to rapidly changing
conditions, including the potential for chaos.
These raw and dynamic exchanges became part of thephysical and conceptual ground from which she built her
new body of work, Rip Current. In Swell and Slipstream(2022), Serendren builds up layers of oil paint, charcoaland sand to create textured reliefs, lines, and forms
drawn from the landscape and bodily shapes, expanding
the legacy of Abstract Expressionism to include a set ofgestures informed by her lived experience as a mother.
Gabriela Vainsencher also employs the gestural marks
from parenthood to create her hanging sculptures. In
Why Is It So Quiet? (Pink), part of the series MotherFigures (2021 – ongoing), she subverts the traditional
iconography of motherhood. Vainsencher’s mothers are
not the picture of otherworldly serenity, but the faceof the maternal mental load. Using a carved drawing
technique, she then rubs, smudges and pinches hermaterials — similarly to the way young children touch
their mothers, which often leaves them feeling “touchedout” (or completely saturated with physical touch).
A counterpart to Vainsencher’s ceramic practice,
Missing Person employs pages of an old archeology
book stacked on top of each other to create an image
that both replicates the chaos of an archeological dig
and comes together into a new hybrid form.

Gabriela Vainsencher, Why Is It So Quiet? (Pink)/Mother Figures series, 2022, Porcelain, glaze,and underglaze, 12 in. × 11 in. × ¼ in.

Weaving artworks together as well as their constellationof themes — self, isolation, body, interruption, time,memory, nature, mortality, care, the unconscious, andthe artistic practice — Anna Maria Maiolino’s poems
serve as narrative threads of the exhibit. The artist
began writing poems in 1971, when she was living in
New York with small children and her husband, who had

Koyoltzintli, Medicine Woman/In the Mouth of the Mountain Jaguar Everybody is a Dancing
Hummingbird series, Photograph and painting, with intervention by Julio Toaquiza,
2010-2019, 19 in. × 21 in.

been granted a scholarship. Isolated and overworked
by house chores, she had to put her art practiceaside. A friend, Hélio Oiticica, urged her to keep adiary, a “record of existence” — random thoughts,scribbles and drawings — whenever time allowed.
These writings, a breakthrough in the artist’s practice,laid the foundations for a pioneering body of work
spanning five decades and a wide range of mediums.
5

Envisioned as a space of community and conversation,
Fruits of Labor — Reframing Motherhood andArtmaking aims to care for the artists and theirwork, for myself, our collaborators and audience, andultimately advocate for change, both in narrative andin the context of policies.
With thanks to Anna Ruth Myers, Asya Geisberg gallery, Hauser & Wirth, Lívia
Gonzaga, Pikler International and TOBE Gallery.
1. Andrea O’Reilly, Matricentric Feminism: A Feminism for Mothers, in Journal of theMotherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (2019).
2. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, Norton (1976).
3. Griselda Pollock, Mother trouble: the maternal-feminine in phallic and feminist theory inrelation to Bracha Ettinger’s Elaboration of Matrixial Ethics,
in Studies in the Maternal (2009).
4. Angela Garbes, Essential Labor: Mothering as a Social Change, Harper Collins (2022).
5. Anna Maria Maiolino, Anna Maria Maiolino: Digo e Tenho Dito. Ubu editora (2019).

Bruna Shapira© apexart 2023
Open Call Exhibition