M/OTHER on view at MOAH

By Betty Ann Brown

"The experience of art challenges us to break free from conventional thinking and embrace the extraordinary." ~Henry Miller  

Historic images of motherhood range from idealized (Raphael’s Madonna and Child) to realistic (Mary Cassatt’s The Child’s Bath); from expressionistic (Alice Neel’s Nancy and Olivia or Kathe Kollwitz’s painful self-portraits with the son she lost to war) to surreal (Leonora Carrington’s The Giantess), even including abstraction (Barbara Hepworth’s paired stone ovals). Images like these have traditionally been tethered to stereotyped constructions of the concept of motherhood: biological females as nurturing, child-focused, selfless, homebound, etc. Alternative images are needed to expand our thinking about this most basic of human roles.

Extending the traditional parameters of mother depiction, the five artists in MOAH’s M/other exhibition focus largely on the symbolic, i.e., the mother portrayed through focus on her gendered body parts, especially her breasts, nipples, and genitals. In doing so, they compel us to see motherhood anew, with what Marcel Proust referred to as “other eyes.”

TANYA AGUINIGA’s sculptural works dominate the main floor gallery of MOAH. She deploys craft-identified materials (ceramics and textiles) to create immense sculptures that may appear abstract on initial viewing but symbolically refer to women’s bodies. One large piece combines seventeen earth-toned discs arranged on the gallery wall in a gigantic X shape. Strands of white rope drape down from them to a central point where they are gathered into a knotted bond, then flow to the floor below. It’s pleasing when viewed as an abstraction, but perceptive viewers will soon interpret the discs as nipples and the white rope as narrow streams of milk. Of course, mammary glands are what give our class of animals its name—Mammalia—but our society tends to focus on breasts as erotic with their nurturing function playing a lesser role. (Think of all the Hollywood films characterizing large-breasted women as highly attractive to men and how few picture mothers nursing.)

NIKE SCHROEDER similarly deploys craft materials to represent symbolic parts of women’s bodies. The MOAH entryway is filled with dozens of her irregularly-shaped textile forms, cascading through the atrium like fabric hailstones. Considered viewing reveals that each stuffed object is puffy and rounded like a breast and each is “topped” with a small ceramic shape that resembles a nipple. It’s a tsunami of breasts, a flood of women parts.

GINA HERRERA creates mixed media sculptures by arranging urban detritus into spindly figurative shapes and topping them with ceramic self-portrait masks. She refers to the Native American Mother Earth, the “Unci Maka” (to use the Lakota/Sioux term.) Herrera highlights the indigenous spiritual respect for the planet as the “mother” of us all. In doing so, she brings sacred resonance to our view of the mother and of women in general.

ZACKARY DRUCKER is both a visual artist working in photography/video and a film producer. Her art explores alternatives to traditional representations of gender…which is precisely what she has examines in the MOAH exhibition. In one particularly powerful photograph, Drucker explores the classic ideals of female beauty by portraying her traditional biological mother paired with herself, a transgender female. The majority of her MOAH works, however, allude to mothers as seen through an LGBTQ+ lens, looking beyond the biological construct to chosen family members. She is concerned with the role of “house mother,” especially the iconic Mother Flawless Sabrina, who was central to the New York queer ballroom scene of the 1970s and ‘80s. As with many of the artists in this exhibition, Drucker invites us to expand our concepts of what to term “mother” means—and what else it can mean.

MARTHE APONTE combines picote (an ancient women’s craft technique from her native France) with embroidery and beadwork to create intimate abstractions the refer to floral forms and, by extension, to women’s bodies. Ancient cultural texts, from India to China to Egypt, used flowers to symbolize the beauty of female anatomy. Floral references to female form are also found in Western poets from Petrach to Shakespeare to Keats and, more recently, in the visual art from Georgia O’Keeffe to Judy Chicago.

Aponte’s sexy flowers are surreal and abstract, decorative and delightful. They invite viewers to imaginary world of grace and pleasure. And they announce the beauty of motherhood found in all of the exhibition’s artworks. The exhibition was expertly curated by MOAH’s Robert Benitez, who gathered this compelling group of artists and artworks so that the exhibition satisfies precisely what Henry Miller asserts it should: it “break[s] free from conventional thinking and embrace[s] the extraordinary."  

Photos courtesy Betty Ann Brown