The Anthropology of Motherhood: Culture of Care exhibition features works of art that engage in the complex visual, material, emotional, corporeal, and lived experiences of motherhood, caregiving, parenting, nurturing, and maternal labor. AOM: Culture of Care presents a slate of artists that embrace the labor of care as “right and rewarding work.” Through video, sculpture, painting, and photography, the works presented address maternal identities with birth as a metaphor for regeneration, creation and renewal.

When Fran Flaherty curated the first Anthropology of Motherhood exhibition in 2014 for the Three Rivers Arts Festival, she did not anticipate how startlingly vital and relevant such an endeavor would be amidst a global pandemic in 2020. Yet, Fran’s beautifully radical exhibition, which is centered on the idea that societies should lead through gestures of care, provides a necessary grounding and reorientation during this unsettling time. While the show was originally produced as an aesthetic experience for nursing mothers functioning also as a space for respite and community, it has grown into a broader exploration of care-giving.

The culture or paradigm of care can be understood as an “ethics of responsibility for the other rooted in love and the material practices of care” that works to denaturalize negligence and violence as assumptions that drive social understanding. In a 2014 article for The Atlantic, Anne-Marie Slaughter, President of the New America Foundation, describes the care paradigm as an acknowledgment and facilitation of interdependence. Human beings cannot survive alone therefore we must care for one another. Slaughter calls for us to refocus our pursuit of happiness from competition and financial success to a social infrastructure that gives equal importance to competition and caregiving.

In many societies, the unpaid labor of care is largely taken up by women. The global pandemic of 2020 has made this over looked face highly visible, whether it is revealed in the tending to children while in quarantine, caring for isolated older relatives, providing sustenance as essential workers in grocery stores, or working on the front lines in hospitals as healing professionals, women bear the brunt. Postcolonial scholars Cho Haejoang and Ueno Chizuko seek to de-gender notions of care stating, “the labor of caring can no longer be designated the work of women…cannot any longer be free labor, nor can it be the cheapest kind of labor…Some people are already living a politics of care that views the condition of depending on others neither as a form of humiliation nor an invisible sacrifice, but as a right and rewarding work.” With these ideas in mind, AOM, Culture of Care presents a slate of artists that embrace the labor of care as “right and rewarding work.” Through video, sculpture, painting, and photography, the works presented address maternal identities with birth as a metaphor for regeneration, creation and renewal. In perfect symmetry, Fran welcomed her first grandchild during this pandemic. And so, in the midst of chaos and pain, life continues and flourishes through the labor of love and care.

The Anthropology of Motherhood: Culture of Care is on view at the Carlow University Art Gallery after celebrating its fifth year as part of the Three Rivers Arts Festival. Normally a functional, hybrid exhibition that is innovatively designed as both an art space, an interactive nursing amenity, and a place of respite for families with young children, this year’s exhibition has been reimagined in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.