'Why have there been no great artist-mothers? (after Linda Nochlin)’

By Emma Mahony
-Dr. Emma Mahony, teaches at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin

 

 

ABSTRACT

 

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in and support for artists who are mothers with a number of exhibitions dedicated to this much maligned sector of the art world, includingmost recently, Fruits of Labor which opened at Apexart in New Yorkin November 2023 and features the work of eight artist-mothers; and the now annual Procreate Project Mother Art Prize 2023, which has a new home in the Zabludowicz Collection in London. Support networks for, and collectives of, artists-mothers have emerged including: The Mothership Project (2013-now) in Dublin; and Mother House Studios (MHS) (2016-now) in London. Books exploring this topic have also recently been published including art critic, Hettie Judah’s How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (2022); and Why Call It Labor? On Motherhood and Art Work (2020), edited by Mai Abu ElDahab and featuring the writings of seven artist-mothers from the Arab world.

 

In order to understand the structural issues artists who are mothers face and to determine how to level the playing field, this article surveys the existing research that has been carried out on artist-mothers and contextualises it both within the broader history of the relegation of women artists by the art world and by patriarchal society. It then draws on strategies that emerge from the discourses of feminist economics, eco-feminism, anti-capitalism, commoning, and radical care, and concludes with a 12-point proposal for change that would arguably transform the art world and the greater creative sector into a more egalitarian system that recognises and values the contributions of all of its participants. Corresponding with the feminist focus of this research the vast amount of the literature I draw upon is by authors who identify as women, non-binary or LGBTQ+.

 

‘Why have there been no great artist-mothers? (after Linda Nochlin)’

 

Introduction

In recent years there has been an upsurge of interest in and support for artists who are mothers with a number of exhibitions dedicated to this much maligned sector of the art world, includingmost recently Fruits of Labor, which opened at Apexart in New York in November 2023 and features the work of eight artist-mothers; and the now annual Procreate Project Mother Art Prize, which has a new home in the Zabludowicz Collection in London. In 2020 the artist Christina Stark launched galerie asterisk*, an online gallery where mother artists can apply to stage back dated exhibitions during the year they have had a child, thereby furnishing them with a C.V. entry for that year (Judah 2022: 63-64). In 2019 co-directors Kate Trumbull-LaValle and Joanna Sokolowski (both recent mothers) released the documentary Artist and Mother which follows the lives of four California based artist-mothers who make ‘motherhood’ a part of their art practice. In 2011 the artist Marni Kotak gave birth in Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn in 2011, and began an 18 year-long durational performance, titled Raising Baby X. Filmed with a Go-Pro camera attached to her body, Kotak has been documenting all the significant milestones in her son’s life and exhibiting them as part of the ongoing art work (Judah 2022: 43-44). In 2009, the Birth Rites Collection – a collection of contemporary art on the subject of childbirth – was founded. It is currently housed in the University of Kent.

 

2023 has seen a number of feminist exhibitions in major galleries including Women in Revolt: Art and Activism in the UK 1970-1990 (2023-24) at Tate Britain, which includes a section titled ‘The Marxist Wife Still Does the Housework’, a reference to the absence of the role of reproductive labour in Marx’s theory of labour relations. RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology (2023-2024) at the Barbican Gallery draws connections between social and environment injustices, and how they are variously represented by the oppression of women and the demise of the planet through extractive industries. In December 2023, The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens opened, What if women ruled the world?, a ten month-long collection rehang, focusing on the work of women artists. The exhibition focuses on feminist themes including violence against women and how inequality and poverty disproportionately effects women.

 

A number of support networks for, and collectives of, artists-mothers have emerged including: The Mothership Project (2013-now) and Mother Artist Makers (MAMs) (2016-now), both located in Dublin; Mother House Studios (MHS) (2016-now) and Mothers Who Make (MWM) (2014-now), located in London; and Maternal Fantasies (2018-now), based in Berlin. Funded research has also been conducted into how better to support artist-mothers, resulting in reports produced by the Freelands Foundation in London, authored by Kate McMillan (2020) and the Mothership Project Satellite Findings (2019), which was supported by the Arts Council of Ireland to survey the effects of parenting on the careers of Irish artists. A number of books exploring this topic have also recently been published including art critic, Hettie Judah’s How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents) (2022); Re-assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices, a collection of essays and art works by the Berlin based feminist art collective Maternal Fantasies (2022); and Why Call It Labor? On Motherhood and Art Work (2020) edited by Mai Abu ElDahab and featuring the writings of seven artist-mothers from the Arab world. In the field of literature there has also been a surge in publishing on the topic of motherhood including, among others Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2023); Anna Prushinskaya’s A Women Is a Woman Until She Is a Mother (2023); Meaghan O’Connell’s And Now We Have Everything; and Liz Berry’s The Republic of Motherhood (2023).

 

Together, this literature sets out both the structural disadvantages artist-mothers face in continuing their careers after child birth, recommendations for how they might be better supported, and examples of initiatives by artist-mothers. Despite this abundance of information, few of these recommendations have been adopted by the art world. Instead it remains focused with steely eyes on the next bright young thing (read white male genius) who will reach the dizzying heights of the apex of the art market. Being a successful artist requires an abundance of interrupted time, sufficient wealth not to need a second job, flexibility when it comes to traveling and attending art world events, (and a good dose of ruthlessness), and artist-mothers simply can’t compete.

 

In order to understand the structural issues artists who are mothers face and to determine how to level the playing field, this article surveys the existing research that has been carried out on artist-mothers and contextualises it both within the broader history of the relegation of women artists by the art world and by patriarchal society. It then draws on strategies that emerge from the discourses of feminist economics, eco-feminism, anti-capitalism, commoning, and radical care, and concludes with a 12-point proposal for change that would arguably transform the art world and the greater creative sector into a more egalitarian system that recognises and values the contributions of all of its participants. Corresponding with the feminist focus of this research the vast amount of the literature I draw upon is by authors who identify as women, non-binary or LGBTQ+.

 

 

Stepping off the Curb

‘Stepping off the curb’ is a term used by activists to describe the moment when a new political subjectivity emerges. I will begin this article with a short story about when and how I stepped off the curb and became a feminist.

 

When I was in my late teens and early 20s and studying at art college, I wasn’t a feminist.

When I was in my mid to late 20s and working as a curator, I wasn’t a feminist.

Feminism felt outdated to me. I believed myself to be the equal to any male artist or curator, and that if I simply worked hard enough I could have it all. The idea that a woman like me might face systemic, legal and cultural disadvantages didn’t enter my psyche.
That all changed abruptly with motherhood.

 

It isn’t accurate to say it changed in an instant, but every day from then on I became more and more aware of how the dominant values that shape our lived reality and its socioeconomic system are patriarchal and neoliberal, and how both these ideologies had the odds stacked against women and mothers.

 

To make matters worse, I was a single parent.

It wasn’t the plan, but my partner left me holding the baby with no financial or emotional support. At the time I was working as a curator of touring exhibitions in a prestigious London gallery, but after my maternity leave came to an end, I felt compelled to resign as I couldn’t do a job that involved me being on the road for one week out of every four when I had a baby, nor could I afford to pay childcare and a mortgage from a single salary.

 

So I packed up and moved back to my parent’s house in Ireland. I was 32, my daughter was 6 months old and I was very disillusioned. I didn’t qualify for any lone parent benefits because I owned a property in London that I couldn’t sell because it was in negative equity, and I didn’t qualify for unemployment benefits because I voluntarily left employment. I tried to find a job as a curator in Ireland, but there were no vacancies, so I started teaching the piano, a skill I had picked up by the age of 16, and one I fell back on. I also secured some part-time lecturing work in an art college. That was 14 and a half years ago and it has taken me that long to get a permanent, pensionable full-time lecturing position.

 

In the interim I got married, I had another child, and I got divorced. There was only so much of being regularly reminded by my ex-husband that he was ‘carrying me financially’, and that I wasn’t even earning the ‘average industrial wage,’ that I could take. When he told me to get a job in a supermarket after I had completed a PhD in three years, had our son in the middle of it and all the while continued to work part-time as a lecturer, I’d had enough.

I left.

Now I’m a lone parent of two children and all that entails, but much happier for it.

 

My ex-husband’s accusation that he was ‘carrying me financially’ often replays in my head and makes my blood boil. Every time he uttered those words to me, I felt small. The relationship I found myself in was a controlling one. At the time, I didn’t have a response, I simply fell silent.

 

The answer I would give today would doubtless be informed by all the feminist and anti-capitalist literature I have read in the interim. I would point out that by taking care of our children and the home (my unpaid reproductive labour), while also working part-time and studying full-time, I was subsidising his capacity to build wealth, to advance his career and to accumulate a retirement fund. I was also nurturing and raising our son (and my daughter) to become future contributors to the capitalist economy (thereby producing labour power). To do all this, I was putting my career on the back burner, deferring advancement and foregoing pension entitlements. I would also direct him to the findings of a recent study conducted by the insurance company Royal London Ireland, which estimated the annual net worth of a stay-at-home parent to be €54,590. The figure is based on the cost of outsourcing childcare, cooking, cleaning, ferrying children to and from school and extracurricular activities, gardening, and supervising homework (Coyle, 2023).

 

I would call attention to the privilege neoliberalism bestows on one subjectivity above all others, that of the white, wealthy, cis-male adult, with a normative functionality. As Amaia Pérez Orozco (2022: 5) argues in The Feminist Subversion of the Economy, ‘power and resources concentrate around this subject and life itself is defined in reference to this subject’s life’. This privilege is evident in the patriarchal structure of the workplace, how its typical nine to five hour day is incompatible for workers who also care for young children (predominately mothers); how state run school systems do not align with the working day, or how holiday leave does not cover school holidays, and how in many countries the cost of childcare forces mothers out of the work place. And how, if they do decide to return to work because time finally allows, they often face unconscious bias, sexual harassment, structural disadvantage and a gender pay gap.

 

To the other accusation my ex-husband regularly levied at me – that in spite my educational qualifications (I had a PhD), I earned less than the ‘average industrial wage’ – I would have responded that the creative sector is shaped by instability, insecurity and precarity. That the average annual income for an artist in the UK is £16,150 (of which only 36 per cent is income generated from their practice). When the gender pay gap of 17.3 per cent it applied, the average income for a woman artist in the UK is reduced to £13,355 which is almost £5,000 less than the minimum wage (£18,138) (McMillan 2020: 8). In the Art & Design school sector where I am employed, women undertake the most zero-hour contract teaching (60 per cent in UK Art & Design Schools; 65 percent in Ireland); the top earners with the most secure contracts are men (57 per cent) (McMillan 2020: 8, 50, 51; White 2023). I would also have called attention to how the creative sector has a culture of deferral of monetary reward in the hope of access to financial security at some point in the future. I eventually achieved financial security at the age of 47. Arguably, I would have made it much more quickly if I hadn’t had two children.

 

The economic precarity that pervades the art world and its creative work force stems from how creative labour is placed in the same political category as reproductive labour. The capitalist economy casts both forms of labour as ‘unproductive’ and consequently, both are undervalued and underpaid, or simply unpaid. Feminism draws on the iceberg metaphor to demonstrate just how much hidden labour and care support props up the socioeconomic system (which comprises just the 10 percent of ice visible above sea level). It recognises that not only is care undervalued or not valued at all by this system, but, as the feminist economist, Nancy Folbre argues: patriarchal society/thinking has placed a moratorium on thinking that allows for economic value to be attributed to care work (cited in Lynch 2022: 7-8).

 

Moreover, both care work and making art are considered to be ‘labours of love’ – passions or vocations that are a reward in and of themselves. The backdrop to this mindset is the legacy of a patriarchal value system where care is perceived to be ‘woman’s work’ and where it is the responsibility of the man to provide financially for his family. Art, in this conception, is a pastime, unless it’s being undertaken by a man, and then it is a career in which he can achieve the lauded status of artistic genius.

 

 

Why there have been no great women artists?

When the feminist art historian Linda Nochlin penned Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? in 1971, she was making the argument that women artists were precluded from achieving a status of greatness by virtue of the systemic societal barriers they faced. Society told them their place was in the home, men judged their work as second rate, denied them access to art schools and when they were finally allowed to attend in the late nineteenth century, they weren’t permitted to study the naked form, a skill considered to be essential to the development of the successful artist. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries women artists weren’t privy to the same professional circles of influence as their male counterparts, such as access to patrons; nor were they allowed to work as apprentices, or compete for major awards and prizes. Without this support and validation structure, it was very hard for a woman to forge a career as a professional artist (Nochlin 2015).

 

Nochlin concludes that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was made institutionally impossible for women artists to attain the same degree of success as their male counterparts, regardless of talent and ability. There have been no great women artists in the annals of art history, because the rules of the game were unfair (ibid).

 

The fault, dear brothers, lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education – education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs and signals (ibid).

 

Jumping forward to 2018, Maura Reilly, colleague and friend of Nochlin, publishes an analysis of gender and racial inequality in the art world, followed by her recommendations for a curatorial ethics to redress these imbalances. In tracking the steps forward made by the art world since 2005, she makes mention of the following examples. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York established the ‘Modern Women’s Fund’(MWF) in 2005 with a goal of addressing imbalances in its collection by focusing on the inclusion of work by women artists in its acquisitions policy, its exhibitions and educational programming. A year later, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm initiated ‘Second Museum of Our Wishes’, a two-year long programme (2006-2008) which called on the Swedish government to fund the acquisition of work by women artists for the museum’s collection. In total the museum secured funds to purchase 26 works by 14 women artists. 2005 saw two women appointed as artistic directors of the Venice Biennale, for the first time in its 110-year history: María de Corral and Rosa Martínez. Four years later in 2009, the Venice Biennale (directed by Daniel Birnbaum) included 43 per cent women artists, the highest tally ever (Mahony 2018). Also in 2009 a radical collection rehang took place at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, which saw the women-artists-only exhibition, Elles@centrepompidos (curated by Camille Morineau) replace the permanent collection hang that had only included 10 per cent women artists (O’Reilly date: 88).

 

However, in the same book O’Reilly notes many regressive steps backwards taken by the art world in terms of gender equality. Although curated by women, Bice Curiger (2011) and Christine Macel (2017) respectively, the gender balance in the 2011 and 2017 editions of the Venice Biennale was still weighted heavily towards men. When the Centre Georges Pompidou rehung its permanent collection in 2012, the male bias that had previously shaped the collection hangs returned – only 10 per cent of the art works displayed were made by women. The following year, 2013 saw a Venice Biennale (directed by Massimiliano Gioni) with only 16 per cent women artists. Also in 2013, the New York art scene saw a virtual take-over of male artists exhibiting in all the major museums and galleries. When Tate Modern rehung its permanent collection in 2016, less than one-third of the artist’s included were women and in the summer of that year all 14 major solo shows in London featured male artists (Mahony 2018).

 

When interviewed in 2017 and invited to revisit her thoughts on gender equality in the art world, Nochlin responded:

 

I think women artists have caught up as leaders as being the interesting ones making art, I think, undeniably conditions are better for women succeeding and a lot of major artists are women but there is still a boys club feeling about certain types of artist…Equality has gone so far but no further (Nochlin 2017, cited in O’Hanian 2017).

 

One of the key indicators of the stalemate to which Nochlin refers can be gleaned in a statistical analysis of the art market where, in 2022, works by women artists only account for four of the top 100 auction sales. The record for the most expensive artwork by a deceased male artist remains with Leonardo da Vinci for Salvator Mundi, sold in 2019 for $450 million. In comparison, Georgia O’Keefe holds the record for the most expensive work of art by a deceased female artist. Jimson Weed / White Flower no. 1, 1932 sold at auction for $44.4 million in 2014. The highest price achieved at auction for a living female artist is $12.4 (£9.7) million for Jenny Saville’s Propped, sold in 2018.

 

A report on the ‘Representation of Female Artists in Britain’ authored by Kate McMillian for the Freelands Foundation and published in 2020, found that, while there were more female than male students undertaking both undergraduate and postgraduate studies in art and design colleges in the UK – and that there was near gender parity (51 per cent women artists) in the selection of early career artists for the annual New Contemporaries showcase exhibition and prize – that after this point women artists began to fair less well in comparison to their male contemporaries (McMillan 2020: 27). This is evident in the gender breakdown her report revealed of artists represented by major London commercial galleries, another major milestone in an artist’s professional career. The study revealed that only 35 per cent of the artists represented were female (McMillan 2020: 6). I conducted a similar study of the four major commercial galleries in Dublin in 2022, revealing that 43 per cent of represented artists are female. In subsequent research conducted by Hetty Judah of London commercial galleries it transpired that ‘The less profitable the gallery is, the more likely they are to represent women artists’ (Judah 2022: 61). This is also true of the commercial gallery scene in Dublin; the gallery that represents the most women artist by percentage also has the lowest turnover, which in turn ties back to how women artist achieve much lower sales prices across the board (Mahony 2022).

 

Other indicators of this stark imbalance can be found in the representation of women artists in major national collections. The National Gallery in London has 2624 works, only 28 of which are by 17 women artists (McMillan 2020: 7). Only 24 percent of the artworks in the Arts Council England Collection are by women artists (McMillan 2020: 46). Statistics on the National Gallery of Ireland’s overall gender breakdown were not available but in 2016, the gallery acquired 342 new works, 332 of which were by men and the remaining 10 by women. These works were made by 26 artists and only one artist was female (Doyle, 2017).The collection of the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) is made up of 971 works, 28 per cent of which are by women artists. However, the museum is actively working on gender equality and in 2023, 71 per cent of the acquisitions were by women artists and 7 per cent by non-binary artists (Viscardi, 2023).

 

 

The Motherhood Factor

‘Being an artist is a full-time unpaid job and so is being a mother, it is very demanding to dedicate yourself to both’ (The Mothership Project 2019: 21)

 

A further defining factor emerges in McMillan’s report, when she notes that the mid 30s represent a ‘sweet spot’ in many artists’ careers, where they are beginning to accrue art world recognition, but that this is also the age at which many women have children and become less visible (McMillan, cited Judah 2022: 13). Recognising this omission in her previous research, McMillan commissioned Hetty Judah to interview artists who are mothers about the impact of motherhood on their careers. Judah interviewed 50 artists (at various stages in their motherhood journey) and compiled the results in an article titled ‘Full, Messy and Beautiful’ that was published alongside the Freelands report in 2020. Judah’s research concluded that ‘motherhood is taboo in the art world’. Funded by the Arts Council of Ireland in 2017, the Mothership Project undertook a survey to determine the needs of parenting artists in Ireland which was published in 2019.

 

So what is it about motherhood that makes it more difficult for a woman artist to continue her career? One answer Judah puts forward is that ‘having kids is often related to a long pause in artistic careers, from which very few women are able to recover fully’ (Judah 2020, cited in Szreder 2021: 140).

 

In the annals of art history there are a number of successful women artists who chose not to have children. Gwen John stated that she would need a life ‘free from family conventions and ties’ in order to pursue a career as a professional artist (John, cited in Judah 2022: 10). Eileen Agar stated that she wanted a life ‘more worthwhile than the usual repetitive routine of marrying and having a brood of children’ (Agar, cited in Judah 2022: 12). Marina Abramovic´ had three abortions because she believed having children would be disastrous for her artistic practice:

 

...One only has limited energy in the body, and I would have had to divide it. In my opinion that’s the reason why women aren’t as successful as men in the art world. There’s plenty of talented women. Why do men take over the important positions? It’s simple. Love, family, children – a woman doesn’t want to sacrifice all of that (Abramovic, cited in Puglise, 2016).

 

If having no kids is the unwritten advice that the art world gives to women, the what happens to artists when they become mothers? Judah notes that if being a ‘woman artist’ is perceived as being inferior, being an artist-mother can often mean invisibility in a sphere which is all about being ‘present’ (Judah 2022: 9). This is compounded by the perception that motherhood is a private decision a woman makes and consequently there are very few structural supports in place for her, particularly if the woman has been working freelance prior to pregnancy (Arsanios and Columbus, 2019: 48).

 

It is not just patriarchal society, but the art world itself that has many ‘structural hindrances’ that affect the artist-mother’s ability to continue in her career (Judah 2022: 9). The art world is structurally designed with the middleclass, flexible, mobile, single, childless artist at its vortex (Abu ElDahab, 2020: 69). Much of the artists’ role today is focused on self-promotion; they are expected to maintain up-to-date social media profiles, as well as ‘being present’ at networking events which typically take place in the evenings (openings, art fairs, dinners, studio visits, meeting the press, sitting on juries) all of which pose a difficulty for the artist who is a mother of young children (Judah 2020a: 16). Few residencies welcome families or are flexible enough to suit the needs of the artist who is parenting, and very few grant awarding bodies except ‘childcare’ as a legitimate expense in realising artworks or during installation periods (Judah 2020a: 18; The Mothership 2019:21). As Joanne Masding ponders after being informed she cannot claim for childcare in an Arts Council England funding application:

 

I wonder why I need to disguise this legitimate cost of working, that falls mainly to women in the form of unpaid labour, rather than accounting for it openly? To me, hiding it contributes to the disparity between the sexes, the extent to which caring roles are seen as unimportant (cited in Judah 2020b).

 

The studio is usually the first thing to go for the artist-mother. The reality of having less time to spend there and less money to pay the rent, makes is hard for them to justify retaining a studio and many move their work into the domestic space which, in turn, impacts on scale, ambition and the types of materials that are safe to use in a home with small children present. Working from home also means that they are also subject to frequent interruptions and nap length timescales to focus on their art work (The Mothership Project 2019: 18; Judah 2020a: 15; Judah 2022: 38).

 

I’ve realised that working from home made me work on a smaller scale; the work was domesticated in this way. Working in the living room or in the kitchen, doing things fast and tidying up faster in order not to leave hazardous goods or too much mess: I think it’s impacted the whole process (Berthon-Moine, cited in Judah 2020b).

 

There are also age limits on ‘advancement opportunities’ that disadvantage women that take time out to care for children (Hydig Dal, 2021: 141). The lifestyle of the artist is therefore anathema with being a mother which is both time and attention consuming, exhausting, lonely, isolating, and can restrict mobility (Abu ElDahab, 2020: 69).

 

In both Judah’s survey of 50 artist-mothers and the Mothership Project Satellite Findings, many of the interviewees admitted to capitulating to social pressure to conceal their motherhood status, for fear that it would impact negatively on their careers (Judah, 2020a; The Mothership Project 2019: 14). The interviewees reported that curators, gallerists and commissioning bodies treated them differently once their announced their pregnancies and/ or had children. This included less frequent communications and invitations to do thing drying up – the assumption being that you are a mother now and nothing else (Judah 2020a: 14; Hydig Dal, 2021: 139). Why Call it Labor? includes a number of first hand accounts of artist who are mothers having job offers retracted and exhibitions cancelled upon revealing their pregnancies. Jirmanus Saba recalls: ‘… I lost a freelance gig and a major grant and exhibition upon revealing my pregnancy’ (2020: 30). Nikki Columbus was offered a position at MoMA PS1 which was later rescinded when she told them she had just given birth. This happened despite discrimination against pregnant women being against the law in the US (Arsanios and Columbus, 2020: 47).

 

Another issue that effects artist-mothers are gaps in their resumes that coincide with the period they have spent raising their children. As Hannah Clugston asks: ‘…don’t read gaps on a CV to indicate a lack of commitment or effort’ (2022). The structural hindrances the artist who is a mother faces, are often coupled with a fear of losing her identity as an artist the longer she spends caring for her children, all the while having to endure the gall of watching her partner’s career continue unabashed.

 

The solutions touted by what has been called ‘neoliberal feminism’, are not a fit for the artist-mother given that the aim of neoliberal feminism is to insert the woman into the existing labour market (Mason-Deese, 2022: ii). This narrative pits women against men and against each other. The onus for success and/or failure is place on the individual woman with no recourse to societal conventions and structural inequalities, and without the solidarity and strength of collective action (Williams, 2021: 25).

 

When neoliberal feminism is applied to the artist-mother, it also fails to acknowledge the struggle of the freelance artist-mother who probably doesn’t qualify for maternity leave, who likely can’t afford to maintain a studio outside of the home, who can’t even afford to pay for childcare so she can return to work as an artist. It is not possible to simply re-insert the artist who is a mother back into the existing art world system. As Mason-Deese argues, it can never be possible for ‘everyone to be included on equal terms in a system [the art world] that is fuelled off the exploitation of surplus labour and bodies’ (2022: ii).

 

 

Time, Space, Money and Care: How to Better Support Artists who are Mothers

 

To treat artists all the same—as being available to produce 10-12 hours or more per day—is a mistake. Because of this we all miss out on what women artists have to offer (Johnson Soliz, cited in Judah 2020b).

 

The core issues identified by the respondents in the Mothership Project survey were: a lack of time to make art; inadequate financial resources to support their careers as artists in addition to paying for child care, and how this is compounded by the economic instability, insecurity and precarity that shapes the life of an artist. They also identified a lack of parent and child friendly studio provision and residencies, and pointed to the biases the creative sector holds of parenting artists in terms of their perceived ability to make work (The Mothership Project 2019: 4).

 

Members of the Maternal Fantasies collective point out that it’s harder for artist-mothers to ask their partners for time to make art work because it’s so poorly paid. The majority of the respondents in the Mothership Project survey concluded that making art involves an upfront investment that may not see any return, or at least not in the short term (The Mothership Project 2019: 21). Consequently justifying putting a child into care in order to pursue creative work that might not see a return for a considerable time is a difficult position to be in, particularly with an unsympathetic partner (Hydig Dal, 2021: 141). Artist-mothers interviewed by both Judah and the Mothership Project used the terms ‘selfish’ and ‘guilty’ to describe how they would feel if they used the family income to pay for childcare so they could make artwork (The Mothership Project 2019: 21; Judah 2022: 42).

 

So you will be looked at as a mother that doesn’t look after her children properly to do a job that is unpaid that only benefits her own glory. You may keep fighting and you may succeed in being able to support yourself with your practice, your work may be recognised as important, but there will be lots of shame and blame along the way and a lot of mothers will give up. This is what I have unwillingly experienced and fought against (Fugazza, cited in Judah 2020b).

 

The cold hard economic reality of the creative sector means that, without access to wealth, artists who are mothers do not have many choices.

 

As the feminist economist Annabelle Williams’ points out ‘Money is vital for women’s independence’ (Williams, 2021: 11). Money gives you the freedom to make choices such as whether to stay at home after you have children, or to return to the workplace; whether or not to apply for promotion to a senior position that will entail more time away from the home; or whether to stay in an unhappy relationship or leave. A respondent in the Mothership Project survey concluded ‘There was a time when it hit me that I couldn’t make art any longer because I simply cannot afford childcare’ (The Mothership Project 2019: 22).

 

What artists who are mothers need (and by extension what all art workers, and all parenting women working in the precarious labour sector need) is access to a universal income which would enable them to financially balance their ‘domestic and emotional labour’ with their ‘creative and intellectual labour’ (Kallenberger and Leão 2021: 12). This equates to having enough money to live on to achieve a basic standard of living with a little left to improve your prospects (Williams, 2021: 261). Countries that have experimented with universal income include: Finland, Germany, Iran, Kenya and the US states of Alaska and North Carolina (Williams, 2021: 261). In 2022, Ireland introduced a 3-year pilot Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) scheme to the value of €325 per week. The pilot scheme will run from 2022-2025 and will support 2,000 artists who were selected on a lottery basis from a pool of qualified applicants across a range of art forms. It is linked to the minimum wage. The hope is that scheme will be ratified and extended to all eligible arts workers after 2025. However, a scheme of this nature needs be tied to the living wage rather than the minimum wage, and should extend to cover artists who are mothers during maternity and parental leave periods. It would also need to extend into a state pension.

 

Artist-mothers would also benefit from a longer period of paid maternity leave to address the gap between the end of the current statutory paid maternity leave (26 weeks at €262 per week in Ireland; 39 weeks in the UK at a rate of 90 per cent of your salary if employed for 6 weeks and £172.48 per week thereafter) and the point when they can re-enter the work force. In Ireland fathers only qualify for 10 days paid paternity leave and 1-2 weeks in the UK, meaning that their parenting role is not normalised or taken seriously by the state. At present many providers in the childcare sector in Ireland and the UK will not accept children younger than one year, and many others only accept children aged two and a half and older; this relates to the staff child ratio these age groups demand (Brennan and O’Connell 2021). In Ireland and the UK state supported childcare does not come into play until children are three years old and in Ireland that cover three hours a days for 38 weeks of the year for two years (the Ecce scheme) and 15 hours of state funded childcare per week for one year in the UK. Before state support, the average cost of full-time childcare for one child in Dublin in 2022 was €1,276 per month (Cleary, 2022); in the UK for a child under 2 it’s £1,188 per month.

 

Judah makes the observation that childcare would not be a trap for women, if childcare responsibilities were equally shared by both parents (Judah 2022: 12). This model would allow the mother artist the same opportunities as her partner to progress her career, and to remain ‘present’ in the art world, as well as being actively involved in parenting. Kallenberger, a member of the Maternal Fantasies collective underscores and extends this observation when she writes:

 

I don’t want to share my lovers with anyone actually. But I’d share my kid with an entire village. I don’t want to be the sole provider or role model. I want support networks. I could love so much better if the pressure weren’t all on me (2021: 33).

 

The division of care duties could be supported by giving fathers equal paid leave entitlements as mothers and thereby normalising their role in the home.

 

Much of this thinking builds on Silvia Federici’s urgent call for humanity to ‘recombine the social division of labour’ that capitalism has separated into productive and reproductive labour – where the former is valued by the market and the latter is undervalued or not valued at all (Federici 2012). Federici theorises that the first step towards realising collective forms of reproduction is breaking down the isolation of the home, particularly for women who are its ‘house prisoners’. She calls for the house to be reclaimed:

 

…as the centre of collective life, one transversed by multiple people and forms of cooperation, providing safety without isolation and fixation, allowing for sharing and circulation of community possessions, and, above all, providing the foundations for collective forms of reproduction (Federici 2012).

 

Federici points to moments in the past when the reproduction of human beings was collective work – such as the communal kitchen and collective housekeeping practiced by the materialist feminists in the US from the last nineteenth century to the 1920s. This practice largely ends with capitalism’s privatisation of reproduction, its normalising and incentivising of the nuclear, single-family household, with its gendered division of labour and its individualised consumption of resources. There are, however, examples of this communalisation of housework still evident today. They include the ollas communes the common cooking pots established by women in Chile and Peru in the 1980s in response to the effects of inflation on food costs, and how the women of the Landless People’s Movement of Brazil, after being granted the rights to farm and maintain the land they had illegally occupied, decided to build their new homes in a compound so they could continue to wash, cook and eat together, share childcare and support each other in the face of gender based violence (Federici 2012).

 

A further necessary step in levying the playing field for the artist-mother is to dismantle the myth of the artistic genius. This myth, called out by Nochlin, in her 1971 paper, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists’, is centered on the mystique of the (typically dead) white, male artist. It is a type of greatness historically attributed to men by other men, a type of greatness that typically excludes women artists. This myth, like that of the self-made man, assumes an innate genius and skill set that magically manifests and is in no way, nurtured, socialised, supported or enabled by the reproductive labour and care this ‘genius’ has received during his lifetime by the women in his life: his mother, his grandmother, his sisters, his wife or partner, his cleaner, his cook, or by the low paid employees that enabled his career to thrive by taking care of everything else in life. Gregory Sholette makes a similar argument when he writes about the art world’s ‘dark matter’; how the low paid, unpaid and precarious artists, artists’ assistants, technicians and front of house staff enable the top tier of artists to achieve the pinnacle of success (Sholette 2011: 1). Most of this dark matter is comprised of women. In place of the artistic genius, then, the art system needs to honour, recognise and place a financial value on the unpaid and low paid reproductive and care labour that supports its operations. As Hydig Dal argues: ‘Patriarchal capitalism’s grand deceit is that care work is free of charge and that nature is free to loot’ (2021: 144).

 

The art system also needs to curtail the dominance of art auction sales by white male artists. This could be achieved by taxing the resale of works by white male artists and introducing legislation whereby all art works purchased by private buyers have to be made available for exhibition by public museums and galleries for six months of every year. This would deter the practice of purchasing art as an investment asset and storing valuable art works in free ports where they reside for long periods of time, some never to be seen by the public again. Together, these measures would serve to devalue the top end of the art market that artificially props up white male artists.

 

To be more equitable to women, mothers and parents who do the bulk of care work, the ‘temporal’ structure of capitalism also has to change. It needs to decelerate (Arsanios and Columbus 2020: 50) Eco-feminism draws attention to the incompatible temporal speeds of ‘capitalist driven productionism’ and care. How the former is linear, future orientated, driven by speed, measurable and quantifiable and how it comes with the expectation that we must continuously strive to do more in less time in order to reach peak efficiency. And how, in contrast, care time is necessarily fluid, relational and cyclical; how it does not have clear boundaries, and how, in its voluntary dimension, it’s not commodifiable (Lynch 2020: 23). And moreover, how caring requires disrupting and challenging the ‘productivist bias’ by ‘making time to care’ where there is not enough time (de la Bellacasa 2020: 206). Eco-feminism also highlights how the artificially ‘speeded up’ time of ‘productionism’ is made possible as a direct result of the unpaid support labour done by women and other carers, to refer again to the iceberg metaphor.

 

This taking back of time, could be facilitated by the art world rolling back on its unreasonable demand for the artist to constantly ‘be present’; at openings, parties, events, etc and instead acting an intermediary on the artist’s behalf. As the artist Kathrin Böhm states:

 

I think that art world should in principal adapt to the fact that many of us have barriers to travelling non-stop, being available non-stop, being able to respond non-stop and look in general at expectations and flexibility. This assumption that one can travel and be everywhere should be scrapped: not just for parents but for everyone (cited in Judah 2022: 82).

 

It could also be facilitated by the art world being flexible when it comes to exhibition and commission schedules, and by introducing practices whereby childcare is taken into account when an artist is installing their work or doing press interviews.

 

 

Mothers Doing it for Themselves

In the face of the lack of existing support structures, artist-mothers have been forming collectives and doing it for themselves. When the Woman’s Building opened its doors in Los Angeles in 1973 (led by artist Judy Chicago; art historian Arlene Raven, and graphic designer Sheila Levrant de Bretteville), its feminist members took the decision to refuse children access to the building, but to permit dogs. This stance (of concealing motherhood) was not unusual in second wave feminism, where the proponents sought to distance their gender from its association with the role of caregiver for children, least it make them appear weak. In protest at this exclusion of children, and by implication mother artists, the collective Mother Art formed in 1973. Member of Mother Art, Suzanne Siegel writes:

 

Although it seems strange today, at beginning of the Women’s Movement in the early seventies some feminists at the Woman’s Building considered being both a serious artist and mother to be in conflict (cited in Mother Art, 2023).

 

One of their first collaborative acts of defiance was to erect the Rainbow Playground for children outside the Woman’s Building. Over the following thirteen years they went on to curate a series of exhibitions of work by artists who were mothers, including their performance series Laundry Works (1977), where the group displayed their art work on temporary clotheslines they rigged up in laundromats across California. The performances lasted for the duration of a wash and dry cycle. Laundry Works was funded by a $700 grant from the California Arts Council, which was later misinterpreted by a derogatory article in the Los Angeles Times as, ‘an effort to being culture to housewives, by staging plays in laundromats’, and described as wasteful and frivolous government spending (cited in Mother Art 2023). Ever defiant, Mother Art went on to stage performances in the public realm including in City Hall and in banks, respectively titled Mother Art Cleans up City Hall and Mother Art Cleans up the Banks (1978), seeking to move the spotlight to the wasteful expenditure in both these state institutions. In the 80s Mother Art staged exhibitions that expressed solidarity with Central American refugees, women facing homelessness, and women unable to access legal abortions (Mother Art 2023).

 

The Hackney Flashers (1974-1980), a socialist feminist collective of photographers, based in Hackney in East London, highlighted the alienation of motherhood and the structural disadvantages facing mothers who want to re-enter the workforce, including the lack of childcare places. They staged two travelling exhibitions Women and Work (1975) and Who’s Holding the Baby (1978), which were displayed in libraries, community health and welfare centres, and at meetings of the Women’s Liberation Movement.

 

Formed in 2018, the Berlin based feminist collective, Maternal Fantasies operate a communitarian method of art making which extends to include their care giving duties as parents. Their practice is based in the intersection of ‘art production and care’ where motherhood – understood as a ‘political, scholarly and artistic practice’ in and off itself – forms the social fabric of their work (Maternal Fantasies 2021: 12, 29). Their collaborative practice typically results in the making of films but not only do they collaborate on the production of their art works, they take it in in turns to share all the labour entailed in producing a finished art work while caring for their families. The jobs they divide up include: cooking, directing, recording, stage design, editing, writing, comforting, caring and supporting (Hydig Dal 2021: 140). Unlike the feminists who frequented the Woman’s Building in the 70s, Maternal Fantasies do not attempt to conceal their status as mothers in order to progress their careers, but chose to openly perform both identities simultaneously with the support of each other (Teles Leão e Silva 2021: 132). In this manner they are both contributing to making motherhood more visible (where historically is has been confined to the private, domestic sphere), and boldly declaring that giving birth, raising children and caring for other human beings is not a peripheral thing that an artist who is also a mother does (behind closed doors), but that is should be recognised and respected as ‘an integral part of artistic and cultural production’ (Jirmanus Saba 2019: 35).

 

Established in 2013 by four Irish artists with young children: Leah Hillard, Michelle Browne, Seoidín O’Sullivan and Tara Kennedy, The Mothership Project is a support network for parenting artists in Ireland focused on helping them foster and build their practices while parenting through discussions, workshops, show & tell events and reading groups. They also seek to raise awareness at policy level of how the art world needs to become more inclusive of artist parents. They received funding from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2017 to conduct a survey of artist parents to determine what supports might be put in place (The Mothership Project 5). Mother Artist Makers (MAMs) is another support network for artists and theatre makers based in Ireland, but with growing international membership. Their campaigning seeks to highlight how mothers working in the creative industries are disproportionately effected by isolation, marginalisation and economic hardship and how they might be better supported (Mother Artist Makers 2023)

 

Mothers Who Makes (MWM), launched in 2014 in Battersea Art Centre in London, there are now multiple autonomously run hubs across the world. The focus is on peer support for mother artists working across a range of art forms. Mother House Studios (MHS) is a model for an open plan studio space where the pregnant and mother artists can create art while their children engage in guided activities in an interconnected child-dedicated space. Mother House Studios initially ran three pilot projects before moving to a dedicated space in Catford South London after receiving funding from a range of backers including the office of the Major of London; Lewisham Council and the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation. They are also working towards developing and rolling out of a tool kit for other groups to establish a similar autonomous studio models nationally and internationally. As of 2023, they are currently in the process of seeking another home (motherhousestudios.com).

 

The Procreate Project, which is linked to Mother House Studios, was founded in London 2013 to support the professional development of artists who are also mothers. In 2017, they established the Mother Art Prize, and open call opportunity for artists who identify as women and non-binary artists who have caring responsibilities. In the past the award has comprised of a cash prize, a one month family friend residency, a professional mentoring session, and a solo exhibition with Richard Saltoun Gallery; and a group exhibition for 20 selected artists at the Zabludowicz Collection in London (Procreate 2023).

 

There are a number of existing artist’s residencies that cater for families and mother artist, but they are few and far between, and many of these were set up in response to research findings. Supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, the Mothership Project partnered with Cow House Studios in Wexford to develop a residency programme that catered for artists with children. What became the Satellite Residency offered onsite childcare, family friendly accommodation, catering and flexibility in terms of when the was residency was undertaken and the possibility of breaking it into shorter slots. The residency was open submission and prioritised artists whose practice and lapsed because of parenting; new parents; and artist parents with an active practice but lack of uninterrupted time to make work (The Mothership Project 2019: 25). To date it has supported 15 artists and their families. The Irish Museum of Modern Art has a family friendly residency studio on its grounds in Dublin. MOTHRA, a Toronto based collective or mother artists established a family friendly residency at Artscape Gibraltar Point on Toronto Island. It is ‘a residency where artists can bring their children, in fact, in order to come they must bring their children.’ (Cullen, cited in Judah 2022: 55). An Artist’s Residency in Motherhood (ARiM), is a DIY residency kit designed by the artist Lenka Clayton for other artist parents, following the model she devised when she had her son and successfully received funding (Judah 2022: 49-50).

 

I will undergo this self-imposed residency in order to fully experience and explore the fragmented focus, nap-length studio time, limited movement and resources and general upheaval that parenthood brings and allow it to shape the direction of my work, rather than try to work “despite” it (Judah 2022: 49).

 

 

Conclusion

 

As this article has endeavoured to demonstrate, the rules of the game are unfair and therefore need to change – the system needs to adapt to accommodate her/their needs. Achieving this will necessarily involve change, both at the level of how the art world is governed and at the level of legislation. The art world, of course, is not an autonomous eco-system, as much as its history would like to suggest, so what is ultimately needed is change at a societal level. The following is a 12-point proposal for change – which brings together all the issues identified so far – that would arguably transform the art world and the greater creative sector into a more egalitarian system that recognises and values the contributions of all of its participants.

 

 

Bibliography

 

Abu ElDabah, Mai (ed.) (2020), Why Call It Labor? On Motherhood and Art. Brussels and Berlin: Mophradat and Archive Books.

 

Arsanios, Mirene and Columbus, Nikki (2020), ‘New York, August 2019’, in Abu ElDabah, Mai (ed.) (2021), Why Call It Labor? On Motherhood and Art. Brussels and Berlin: Mophradat and Archive Books, pp. 41-56.

 

Brennan, Cianan and O’Connell, Daniel (2021), ‘Creche place shortage: Share your experience’, Irish Examiner, 27 August. Available at: https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-40367051.html

 

Cleary, Mairead (2022), ‘Dublin parents paying highest childcare costs in Ireland at over €1,200 per month’, Newstalk, 7 June. Available at: https://www.newstalk.com/news/childcare-costs-parents-paying-per-month-1351374

 

Clugston, Hannah (2022), ‘Why Is It Still So Hard To Be Both A Mother And An Artist?, British Vogue, 1 October. Available at: https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/being-a-mother-and-an-artist.

 

De La Bellacasa, Maria Puig (2020), Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.

 

Doyle, Michelle (2017), ‘Why art women artists hard to find in our “boy crazy” museums and galleries? A gender audit reveals a poor presentation of women in some of our national cultural institutions’, irishtimes.com. Available https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/why-are-women-artists-hard-to-find-in-our-boy-crazy-museums-and-galleries-1.3071693

 

Federici, Silvia (2012), ‘Feminism and the Politics of the Commons’ in David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (eds.), The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market & State. Available at:http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/feminism-and-politics-commons

 

Getty (2023), ‘Preserving the Legacy of the Los Angeles Woman’s Building’, Getty. Available at: https://www.getty.edu/news/preserving-the-legacy-of-the-los-angeles-womans-building/

 

Hackney Flashers (2023), ‘Work of a Women's Collective 1974-1980’. Available at: https://hackneyflashers.co.uk/

 

Hydig Dal, Mikala (2021), ‘Art, Babies, Money: Replacing Capital with Care as the Foundation for a Planetary Economy’, in Maternal Fantasies (eds.) (2021), Re-assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices. Eindhoven: Ononmatopee 216, pp. 138-151.

 

Jirmanus Saba, Mary (2020): Boston June 2019 (Or “Artistic Genius is the Myth of the Colonial Patriarchy: Part One”), in Abu ElDabah, Mai (ed.) (2020), Why Call It Labor? On Motherhood and Art Work. Brussels and Berlin: Mophradat and Archive Books, pp.25-40.

 

Judah, Hettie (2020a), ‘Do Female Artists Have To Choose Between A Career and Motherhood’, Elephant.Art, 14 December. Accessed 4 December 2023. Available at: https://elephant.art/do-female-artists-have-to-choose-between-motherhood-and-a-career-14122020/

 

Judah, Hettie (2020b), ‘Full, Messy and Beautiful’, in McMillian, Kate, Representation of female artists in Britain during 2019. London: The Freelands Foundation.

 

Judah, Hettie (2022), How Not to Exclude Mother Artists (and other parents). London: Lund Humphries.

 

Kallenberger, Magdalena, (2021) ‘Building Intimacy Across Difference: Collective Writing, Reading and Listening’, in Maternal Fantasies (eds.) (2021), Re-assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices. Eindhoven: Ononmatopee 216, pp. 28-41.

 

Kallenberger, Magdalena and Leão, Maicyra (2021), ‘Introduction’, in Maternal Fantasies (eds.) (2021), Re-assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices. Eindhoven: Ononmatopee 216, pp. 10-18.

 

Lynch, Kathleen (2022), Care and Capitalism: Why Affective Equality Matters for Social Justice. Cambridge: Polity Press.

 

Mahony, Emma (2018), ‘Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating by Maura Reilly’ Curator: The Museum Journal, 61:3, July 2018, pp. 507-12.

 

Mason-Deese, Liz (2022), ‘Translator’s Preface: Translating from One Crisis to Another’, in Pérez Orozco, Amaia, The Feminist Subversion of the Economy: Contributions for a Life Against Capitalism. New York and Philadelphia: Common Notions, pp. i-x.

 

McMillan, Kate (2020), Representation of Female Artists in Britain During 2019. London: Freelands Foundation. Available at: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://creativelandtrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/CLT_Representation-of-women-artists-2020.pdf

 

Mother Art (2023), ‘About’. Available at: https://motherart.org/about/

 

Mother House Studios (2023), ‘About’. Available at: https://www.motherhousestudios.com/

 

The Mothership Project (2019), ‘The Mothership Project Satellite Findings’. Dublin: The Arts Council. Available at: https://themothershipproject.wordpress.com/

 

Nochlin, Linda (2015), ‘From 1971: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, artnews.com, 30 May. Available at: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/retrospective/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists-4201/

 

O’Hanian, Hunter (2017), ‘An Interview with Linda Nochlin’, CCA News Today, 8 June. Available: https://www.collegeart.org/news/2017/06/08/an-interview-with-linda-nochlin/

 

Pérez Orozco, Amaia (2022), The Feminist Subversion of the Economy: Contributions for a Life Against Capitalism. New York and Philadelphia: Common Notions.

 

Procreate Project (2023), ‘About’. Available at: https://www.procreateproject.com/#

 

Puglise, Nicole (2016), ‘Marina Abramovi? says having children would have been “a disaster for my work”’, theguardian.com, 26 July. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/jul/26/marina-abramovic-abortions-children-disaster-work

Sholette, Gregory (2011), Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture. New York, Pluto Press.

 

Szreder, Kuba (2021), The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World. Manchester: The University of Manchester The Whitworth.

 

Teles Leão e Silva, Maicyra, (2021), ‘Core and Margins: Porous Tools of Feminist Collectivity’ in Maternal Fantasies (eds.) (2021), Re-assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices. Eindhoven: Ononmatopee 216, pp. 124-135.

 

Viscardi, Melissa (2023), ‘Email response to query about the number of works in the IMMA Collection by women artists’, 30 June [Unpublished]

White, Jack (2023), Study shows ‘alarming levels’ of precarious employment within higher education’, Irish Examiner, 11 October. Available at: https://www.irishexaminer.com/news/arid-41244283.html

Williams, Annabelle (2021), Why Women are Poorer than Men: And What We Can Do About It. Dublin: Penguin Random House.