Responding to our time, Picturing Motherhood Now brings together works by a diverse range of contemporary artists who reimagine the possibilities for representing motherhood. Drawing on a range of feminisms, it challenges familiar archetypes of motherhood, construing motherhood as a multivalent term. The artists in Picturing Motherhood Now use motherhood as a lens through which to examine contemporary social issues—the changing definitions of family and gender, the histories and afterlives of slavery, the legacies of migration, and the preservation of matrilineal Indigenous cultures.



Picturing Motherhood Now focuses on art made in the past two decades, while integrating work by significant pioneers to narrate an intergenerational and evolving story of motherhood.