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| Feminist Art and the Maternal
ISBN: 9780816666270
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Minnesota Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Motherhood in art; Feminism and art; Women artists; Arts Modern -- 20th century;
Feminist motherhood is a surprisingly unexplored subject. In fact, feminism and motherhood have been often thought of as incompatible. Profound, provocative, and innovative, Feminist Art and the Maternal is the first work to critically examine the dilemmas and promises of representing feminist motherhood in contemporary art and visual culture. Andrea Liss skillfully incorporates theory with passionate personal reflections on the maternal, and in doing so she advances a fresh and necessary perspective on both feminism and art. Offering new research on works by well-known and emerging artists who approach feminist motherhood issues from their own knowledge and experiences, Liss explores a wide range of examples from the challenging to the taboo, including Mary KellyOCOs Post-Partum Document, Mierle Laderman UkelesOCOs Maintenance Art projects, Ren(r)e CoxOCOs YoOCO Mama portraits, and Ngozi OnwurahOCOs film The Body Beautiful. Liss considers traditional characteristics that mothers are assumed to possess, such as nurturing, empathy, and sacrifice for their childrenOCoqualities that paradoxically have negatively defined women as OC sentimentalOCOOCoand assertively revalues them within both motherhood and feminism. Throughout, she deftly intertwines theoretical analysis with the arresting and enlightening first-person voices of artist-mothers and their children.Putting forth an original ethics of feminism and the maternalOCohow to be in the place of the other and inside oneOCOs self, how to care for another and oneOCOs selfOCoLiss reconceives the mother-child relationship as a model for relations among races, genders, and ages and radically reinterprets maternal traits as vital forms of social, artistic, and political address." |
