In celebration of Mother's Day, Here's some Maternal/Matrocentric art for you to enjoy all created by mama artists. Let this remind you that motherhood isn't always going to look like the Madonna and Child art archetypes!
Pregnant Woman (2008) Bourgeois
Louise Bourgeois created many works depicting motherhood and birth. Her relationship with her mother, who was a weaver, inspired a series of large sculptural spiders.
Frida and the Miscarriage (1932) Kahlo
Frida Kahlo often depicted her emotional and physical pains in her art. Her many miscarriages became a subject for her work as well.
Ma Vie en Rose (2015) Zangewa
Billie Zangewa creates beautiful silk fabric collages depicting the mundane and domestic.
The Pregnant Women (1971) Neel
Mother and Child (Nancy and Olivia) (1982) Neel
Alice Neel took the mother figure and rejected the male gaze to depict her honestly, with anxious eyes and heavy pregnant bellies.
Woman with Dead Child (1903) Kollwitz
The Mothers (1921) Kollwitz
Printmaker Kathë Kollwitz lost her son to war, her depictions of mother-grief will break your heart.
To the mamas displaced and looking for a new home, to the mamas holding down the fort through poverty or war, to the single-mamas who do it alone, to the mamas who mourn the loss of their child, to the mamas who never got to hold and kiss their babies due to miscarriage or still-birth, to the mamas who feel like they're failing every day, to the foster/adoption mothers, to the step-moms, to the mamas who are missing or mourning for the loss of their own mothers, to the mamas who struggle through illness- mental and physical, to the mamas who celebrate the little victories, to the mamas drowning in overwhelm, to the mamas nourishing their own needs alongside their children's, to the mamas surrounded by trama, to the mamas who wish to be mothers but can't, to the grandmamas, to the ones who fill a mother-shaped hole in a child's heart, to the mamas who love, to the Earth Mother herself...
Happy Mother's Day!
Collection of drawings and paintings touching on themes of motherhood, emotional labor, pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding, and the postpartem body by Tiana Traffas
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