The inaugural exhibition at the University Art Museum at New Mexico State University focuses on motherhood in contemporary art and the curious nuances of labor — labor in birth, labor in childrearing, and labor in intergenerational collaboration. Labor: Motherhood & Art 2020, features 22 artists, and was co-curated by museum director Marisa Sage and NYC-based artist Laurel Nakadate. Labor builds on a 2018 exhibition Nakadate organized at Leslie Tonokonow Artworks and Projects in New York.
Noted works include Patty Chang’s “Milk Debt,” a single channel video from a larger (and ongoing) performance and video project where a woman recites lists of crowd sourced fears while pumping breast milk in public.
Playing on a similar premise of indexing is Lenka Clayton’s “Mothers Days, 15 July 2019,” a limited-edition artist book that appears behind glass alongside an excerpt of mounted pages that track a single day in the life of multiple mothers. A sense of humor, sleeplessness, intimacy, and obligation emerge as participants share the mundanity of their schedules (during which some art is occasionally produced). Complex mother-child dynamics appear via Tracey Baran’s C-Print photo, “Daren meets his mother for the first time.” Baran captures Daren and his half-sister gazing at the camera while seated in a hot tub; their mother stands beside them with her back turned. Her posture contrasts with the nudity of all three, tightly packed within the small tub, thrown into immediate acquaintance. Beside this is “Madame Mama Bush,” a Mickalene Thomas photograph of Thomas’s mother and former model, Sandra Bush, lying with breasts exposed on a chaise lounge. The photo would almost mirror Manet’s Olympia, except that the subject looks upward, eyes closed.
The collaboration of children is additionally platformed, though the power dynamics of these relationships are regrettably marginalized. In “Apasálooke Feminist #2,” Wendy Red Star presents a collaborative self-portrait of herself with her daughter, Beatrice Red Star Fletcher. They wear bright elk tooth dresses, subverting the predominant portrait history of Apasálooke (Crow) women, taken in black and white by white male photographers. Las Hermanas Iglesias’s “Motherlove” is a woven installation produced by three generations including two sisters, Lisa and Janelle (Las Hermanas Iglesias), their mother, Bodhilde, and Lisa’s child, Bowery. The weaving patterns reference Sheila Hicks and Anni Albers and present multiple geometric cloths that drape over a wooden frame reminiscent of a loom or canvas stretcher.
In Joey Fauerso’s multimedia installation, “You Destroy Every Special Thing I Make,” the artist invited her two young sons into the studio and, in the midst of her own health issues, filmed the kids interacting with (and often tearing down) her stark black and white sculptural tableaus in painstaking but nevertheless cathartic explosions. Two lush Justin Kurland photographs depict mothers walking naked through landscapes. Wall didactics describe the artist traveling the country with her child to photograph radical and progressive communities. In addition to mothers, the show quietly implicates children, examining the conflict between a commitment to one’s art and a commitment to one’s child, particularly within a public realm.
