The paradigm of care can be understood, according to Postcolonial scholars Cho Haejoang and Ueno Chizuko, 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 many societies, the unpaid or underpaid labor of care is largely taken up by women.  The COVID pandemic has made this over looked fact highly visible, whether it is revealed in the tending to children while in quarantine, caring for isolated older relatives, providing sustenance as essential workers, or working on the front lines in hospitals as healing professionals. In response, this panel seeks to explore the aesthetic, performative and collaborative dimensions of cultures of care through the framework of The Anthropology of Motherhood: Culture of Care (AOM), a six-year ongoing art and exhibition project that visualizes art within the paradigm of care. AOM addresses the complex visual, material, emotional, corporeal, and lived experiences of motherhood, caregiving, parenting, nurturing, and maternal labor through the lens of decolonial maternal feminisms.

AOM was founded by Fran Ledonio Flaherty who identifies as a disabled, deaf-gained artist, and Asian immigrant mother. In gathering contributors to AOM, past and present, this panel seeks to center female relationalality and solidarity as a model and heuristic for feminist pedagogy, creative production, and curatorial practice through the agency of naming and acts of gathering and encounter. Central to this endeavor is the process of de-gendering notions of care through an interdisplinary approach that situates artistic performances, academic and curatorial discourse and reflections of lived experience within an active and agentive network.

AOM addresses maternal identities with birth as a metaphor for regeneration, creation and renewal through a broader exploration of care-giving. The project served as an aesthetic experience for nursing mothers and a space for respite and community, and grew into a broader exploration of care-giving. According to Haejoang and Chizuko, “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.”

Parenthood: Choices, Vices and Arts Expressions in Being a Disabled Parent

Fran Flaherty

Fran Flaherty and Ruth Fabby, disabled artist-mothers that have endured scrutiny, intrusion, judgement and criticism in adding to the population. Willing and equal to the task of motherhood, Fran and Ruth’s stories of motherhood are full of un-encouraging reprove. As artists, however, they suddenly realized, they’ve not made art about this. This paper will discuss the lack of representation of Deaf/disabled parents and its intersection with being a disabled artist. What happens to the narrative of disabled artist mothers in areas such as our reproductive rights, our freedom to choose birthing procedures? How can children of disabled artist-parents be supported? Why disabled artist-mothers do not readily represent these issues in their art? How important is it for disabled mother-artists to make art about being a disabled parent? What can institutions, arts and cultural producers do to support disabled parent-artists’ careers?

Lioness Collective: Performance and Poetry Reading

Lioness Collective (LC) is an interdisciplinary and activist collective comprised of a group of diverse mother-artists from varied disciplinary and professional backgrounds (doula, poet, visual artist, etc.) LC’s project centers sisterhood, motherhood, and caregiving within creative and activist practices. For the panel, the group will engage in a series of short artistic performances, a poetry reading and personal reflections on being an artist-caregiver.

Caring as Curating: Maternal Feminist Practices and Aesthetics in “Anthropology of Motherhood”

Amy Bowman-McElhone

This paper assesses Anthropology of Motherhood as an example of maternal feminist aesthetics and proposes that the exhibition embodies a curatorial model of care. By locating AOM within larger representational systems of domestic labor, anti-ableist activism, and defining it within a framework of curatorial care, this paper endeavors to situate the project within contemporary histories of art as a means to decenter dominant patriarchal narratives of labor and care specifically within cultural institutions.