Featured in Art Basel

VALIE EXPORT featured on Art Basel In ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood’ curated by Hettie Judah

29 February 2024

Is this the end of the art world’s taboo around parenthood?

The rise of a new generation of artists – and a spate of high profile shows – seems to suggest so

By Skye Sherwin

[...] ‘Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood’ – the Hayward Gallery’s touring exhibition that begins at the Arnolfini in Bristol this March with an accompanying Thames & Hudson book by its curator Hettie Judah – is the latest in a number of maternity-themed shows and writing. Other notable examples include ‘Mother!’ at Louisiana in Humlebæk, Denmark (2021), and The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem (2022), by Julie Phillips, which explores how leading 20th-century figures have negotiated motherhood and art-making.

Through How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (And Other Parents), an earlier study into the impact of motherhood on artists’ careers, Judah found that ‘artists were constantly being told that motherhood wasn’t a subject for important art,’ she tells me. Yet her research into the subject has coincided with ‘a wider cultural interest,’ and a boom in ‘art that allows us to see what doesn’t usually get talked about.’ ‘Acts of Creation’ features the work of 60 artists spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. It includes today’s leading contemporary figures – a generation who are moving beyond the idea that haunted second wave feminists, ‘that motherhood was a trap that would send women back into the kitchen,’ Judah explains.