“Mother” Exhibition
Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
[Image: Tracey Baran "Daren Meets His Birth Family for the First Time" (2003)]
This event has ended.
Video & Photographic Works from the 1960s to now by
Tracey Baran, Patty Chang,
Kate Gilmore, Mary Kelly,
Lisa Kereszi, Justine Kurland,
Malerie Marder, Marilyn Minter,
Laurel Nakadate, Yoko Ono,
Ilene Segalove, Laurie Simmons,
Mickalene Thomas, Carmen Winant
and others
The subject of motherhood has never been more urgent than in today’s political climate, implicit in the separation of families at the American border, political figures giving birth while serving in office, recent articles about the ongoing discrimination against mothers in the workplace, U.S. opposition to the breast feeding resolution proposed at the UN—affiliated World Health Assembly in Geneva this past Spring, and the endless challenges to laws that allow women to maintain control over their own bodies and reproductive choices.
Women artists have long questioned the choice of becoming a mother for the sake of career. Images of motherhood have traditionally been romanticized within the Western art historical canon. Aspects of motherhood have largely been marginalized, or absent from the mainstream discourse of contemporary art.
Exploring the complexity of women’s relationships to motherhood through a wide variety of approaches, this show includes works by a diverse group of artists, including those who are mothers themselves and those who have chosen not to have children.
Among the works on view are The Mom Tapes (1974–1978), the highly acclaimed, darkly comic exposition of a mother/daughter relationship by the pioneering video artist Ilene Segalove; a black & white photograph from Marilyn Minter’s Coral Ridge Towers series (1969), depicting the solitude and aging glamour of the artist’s mother; a new piece by Carmen Winant, whose standout installation, My Birth, consisting of 2,000 found photographs of women giving birth, is on view in Being: New Photography 2018, at The Museum of Modern Art (through August 19th), and new photographs by Patty Chang delineating her global fears and those specifically for the future of her son.
The exhibition has been organized in collaboration with Laurel Nakadate, whose most recent solo exhibition, The Kingdom, focusing on the birth of her son and the loss of her mother, took place earlier this year at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects.
Media
Schedule
from September 06, 2018 to October 27, 2018
Opening Reception on 2018-09-06 from 18:00 to 20:00