MoM: Letter from the Founder – Joy Report

We’ve got our plan of action: MoM needs to focus on FINANCIALS moving forward.

OUR ACTION ITEM: It’s all about the money! Throughout the years, many teams and individuals have helped to develop the MoM vision; its mission, its programs, and its outreach. I have strived to do my best, bringing this into the world because of a deep personal commitment to mothers everywhere – the labor they perform, their experiences, their hearts and a passion for the artistic and academic study of mothers and m/otherhood.

I moved MoM from New York City to St. Petersburg with the intention of seeing it grow and thrive after we were unable to secure a next-level space in Manhattan. Now that I have the flexibility to focus on this project full-time, I plan to solidify relationships in St. Petersburg while cultivating my personal live/work space which is now the non-profit MoM Art Annex.

The Annex serves as an incubator project for making the MoM vision to come alive in Florida. In order to do this, attention needs to shift. To that end, the next year will be almost exclusively focused on building our coffers through memberships, donations, grants, and partnerships. We must do this if MoM is going to thrive. Please join me in this affirmation and keep this top of mind and action! This is how we put M/otherhood on the Map. Please HELP US TRIVE! Join one of our many initiatives.

It’s Not Like We’re Slackers – It’s Been a Busy Summer!

Pictured here, summer interns Sarah Akomoh and Teddy Friedline

Intern, Mary Noah. BIG shout out for her work with MoM this summer. She has reconfigured our Wisdom Sharing Document and is finishing up our Grant Sharing Document. In addition, the website has been updated with all our new information as well as our work together honing in on ‘mission‘ etc. I believe the work is well-reflected on the site! Lastly, she leaves us with new logos and a Social Media Campaign in place. Her diligence has greatly improved our infrastructure in Florida, picking up where our New York interns left off six years ago! THANK YOU MARY!

Intern, Sarah Akomoh contributed to our Grants Database and we will be submitting to the Pinellas Foundation this week. Sarah also got MoM listed here at Florida Arts Axis THANK YOU SARAH!

Intern, Teddy Friedline has been reworking language on the JourMS site as well as the SocMS site. This has enabled appropriate updates since the project was created in 2015. Teddy will be wrapping up a social media campaign about these initiatives with us in the coming weeks. THANK YOU TEDDY!

Intern, Emma Andrews has been working on a book project for Queering Parenting. She is endeavoring to create materials that will facilitate both a child’s perspective on identity as well as adult’s perspectives. Her presentation will be available online and she will present her work on August 22nd in our Online Community Portal 7-8:30PM EST. JOIN US IF YOU CAN!

Intern, Rithik Promod begins delivering his Fertility Goddess exhibit this week. We are LOOKING FORWARD!

We hosted 4 onsite Residencies this summer at the MoM Art Annex ranging from fine arts, to print making, to writing. SHOUT OUT TO: Jessica Caldez, Tara Blackwell, Gloria Munoz, and Rachael Grad.

Elena Rodz – Website Manager, has been so impactful, helping to redesign, upgrade, and empower our website infrastructure. Her work with us is ongoing, her expertise is in the museum and non-profit marketplace, and we are all better for her involvement! THANK YOU ELENA!

Deborah Gelch – Strategic Advisor and I continue to iron out technical details of our new infrastructure modalities including Salesforce, Constant Contact, and Quickbooks integration. We are poised for memberships and tweaking the design elements. On October 21, we collaboratively host our first community cocktail event on behalf of MoM in St. Petersburg. YAY DEBORAH!

Nicole Mussleman- JourMS Editor, has been hard at work on the editorial aspects of the Journal of Mother Studies. We have more submissions than ever before and are still planning on our September 1 online publication date. Nicole also won the very prestigious award at the Hemingway Society Conference 2022. YAY NICOLE!

I will be submitting recommendations to Tracy Sidesinger, Residency Coordinator; and Zabrina Shkurti, Living Board President this week, looking at ways we might maximize MoM’s mission with existing programs. Kasia Nowaski and I will be re-connecting in September over online course development.

More to come.

Keep Swimming,

Martha JOY Rose

Pandemic Parenting and Mothers Making Art

Rachael Grad Pandemic Project Water Coors
Rachael Grad Wall of Postcards and Water Colors

Collaborating and Carving Out Space for Art

Rachael Grad’s Remote Residency supports an exercise in curatorial collections of mother artists who managed to create artwork and keep up their studio practice while parenting and teaching during COVID 19 pandemic. The artist mothers she identified found ways of collaborating with other parent artists while also making art at home; they created on desks and also big art in public spaces. At different times, the women featured in this MoM online exhibit have involved their children in art-making while still craving, and carving out, an autonomous practice as well. They drew strength both from alone time and from working with other parent artists. By capturing aspects of their own worlds, while quarantining at home with children and partners, these mothers have been able to express themselves during difficult circumstances. The evidence of this is elucidated in this here: August, 2022. See the page where we are creating this exhibit here.

In Rachael’s Words: Moms Making Art During Challenges

When I became a mom for the first time, I started a daily drawing project. I picked one break a day in between hourly nursing my newborn, when instead of showering, cleaning, preparing food, or heaven forbid resting, I drew. I kept pencil and paper easily accessible and ready to use. With each child during the difficult first years, I went back to daily drawing or painting when possible. Often I would draw or paint a child’s favourite stuffed animal every day for months. Fewer decisions about subject matter and materials smoothed the path to making art. Instead of thinking, I would just focus on the capturing the toy in a silly pose or the light falling that day on the stuffed animal.

In times of crisis, like the first COVID-related pandemic lockdown in March 2020, I return to this reassuring art practice. Daily drawing projects for me are part art therapy and part art routine. I can’t pretend that these daily drawings and paintings are my best artwork. But at least during difficult times, I found a way to keep creating art.

This is not original or innovative. The daily drawing project idea has been around for ages. I came across the suggestion while researching how women manage to have a studio practice with children, work, and other responsibilities. When I became pregnant for the first time, I started obsessively researching how mothers manage to also be artists. I wanted to know how productive, often prolific, parent artists were able to thrive with young children.

Below are some of my top books and resources that I repeatedly return to when I need encouragement and inspiration. I also explain why they continue to serve as guidance and motivation and how that theme will be featured in the upcoming MOM online art exhibition. Rachael Grad, 2022.

The M Word; Real Mothers in Contemporary Art edited by Muriel Chernick and Jennie Klein. Bradford: Demeter Press, 2004 [Click to Read More]

The anthology includes interviews, essays, and images of visual art and exhibitions of mother artists. Feminist theory and maternal creativity are addressed in these excerpts. The book also contains colour images of artwork and poetry on motherhood. The book begins with an interview with Mary Kelly reflecting on after Post-Partum Document 30 years after it was made. The second interview is with Kelly and her son Kelly Barrie (MutualArt. Accessed 30 July 2022). Kelly Barrie is also an artist and had responded to his mother’s series of work in which he was a collaborator when he was a child. This work was shown together in the 2008 Sydney Biennial (16^th Biennale of Sydney, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), 18 June – 7 Sep. 2008. https://www.mca.com.au/artists-works/exhibitions/16th-biennale-of-sydney/. Accessed 30 July 2022.)

The first two interviews of Kelly and her son immediately captured my attention. I then discovered new writers and artists like Monica Bock and Maternal Exposure (or, don’t forget the lunches) (1999-2000) in this anthology. As a mother, I’m always considering how the work I make may impact my children in future. If I collaborate with them as children, how will they feel about the work as adults? How will my young kids react to my artwork about them when they grow up? Several essays in the book address this topic from mothers’ and children’s points of view. Kelly Barrie, Tanya Llewelyn, and the other people in the book who had collaborated with their mothers as children positively describe their experiences and became artists themselves. Participating in their mothers’ artwork revealed aspects of their childhood to the public, however, they were not shown nude, as Sally Mann’s often photographed her children (Mann, Sally, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. Little Brown and Company, 2016.)

Uninvited; Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment by Sarah Milroy and A.C Dejardin. Vancouver: Publishers Group West, 2021 [Click to Read More]

The catalogue for an exhibition with 200 artworks of Canadian women artists from across the country who were contemporaries to the Group of Seven male painters. The exhibition also includes the textiles and beadwork of indigenous women throughout the show. Some of the female artists were immigrants to Canada and many paintings depict city scenes and portraits of indigenous people and immigrants.

The moving essay by Christi Belcourt describes the indigenous perspective of traditional heirlooms like tikinaganen, the Anishinaabemowin word for “cradleboards,” meant to carry babies, yet on view in museums (103, 294). The catalogue contains women’s personal stories of hardship, sacrifice, and obscurity. I had never heard of any of these female artists until I saw the exhibition in person at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection last year (Uninvited; Canadian Women Artists in the Modern Moment https://mcmichael.com/event/uninvited/).

The women’s artwork is just as impressive their male contemporaries, even though their careers were sidelined in favor of their husbands, such Bess Harris, wife of Lawren Harris, and Regina Seiden Goldberg, who gave up her career to support her painter husband (110). I am fortunate in not having to agive up my work for that of anyone else and this show is a reminder to keep making art even with no recognition or reception.

Meet the Newest Artist Resident at MoM: Gloria Munoz

MoMs Newest Artist Resident: Gloria Munoz

We are excited to announce our newest Guest Artist in Residence, Gloria Muñoz! During her residency, Gloria hopes to focus on developing her novel which is set in 1940s Colombia during the period known as La Violencia. With elements of fabulism, historical fiction, and eco-poetics, the story of two sisters who are displaced by violence and left to fend for themselves is a testament to how we can experience wonder, and even magic, after loss.

Continue reading to find out more about Gloria.

Gloria Muñoz is a Colombian-American writer, literary translator, and advocate for multilingual literacy and writing. She was awarded the Academy of American Poets 2019 Ambroggio Prize and the Gold Medal Florida Book Award. She has also been honored by the Highlights Foundation’s 2022 Diverse Verse Fellowship, the Macondo Workshop, Lumina’s Multilingual Nonfiction Writing Award, a Las Musas Mentorship for Latine and nonbinary authors, a New York State Summer Writers Institute Fellowship, a St. Petersburg Arts Alliance Muse Award, a Creative Pinellas Grant, the Estelle J. Zbar Poetry Prize, the Bettye Newman Poetry Award, a Gen Yes Doris Duke Foundation Artist Award, a Think Small to Think Big Artist Grant, and a St. Petersburg Arts Alliance’s Jim Rolston Professional Development Grant. Gloria was part of the inaugural Tin House YA workshop and has presented her writing, research, and advocacy work at conferences, colleges, public schools, and book festivals across the United States and Latin America. Her writing has appeared in Puerto del Sol, VIDA Review, Acentos Review, Lumina, the Rumpus, Yes Poetry, Juke Joint, Best New Poets, Sweet, Burrow Press, Cosmonauts Avenue, Entropy, Wildness, Cagibi, and elsewhere. Muñoz is also the author of the chapbook Your Biome Has Found You. She holds degrees from Sarah Lawrence College and the University of South Florida. A proponent of cross-disciplinary collaboration, Gloria has worked alongside botanists, musicians, dancers, historians, classicists, visual artists, conservationists, and neuroscientists. She is a co-founder of Pitch Her Productions and she is one-half of the songwriting team Moonlit Musíca. Most days she writes, teaches, and works with environmental nonprofits.

Also, Announcing This Week:

MoM is also pleased to announce, a conversation about the film, Adventures in Miscarriage with director Cheryl Furjanic, who presented her film trailer at the MoM Conference in 2022 – in person in St. Petersburg in March!

She received incredible feedback and has just launched a new version of the trailer and a summer fundraiser for the film. Here is the link. https://watch.showandtell.film/watch/adventures-in-miscarriage-summer-fundraiser

It will be up until July 31st. Then, on Wednesday, July 27th at 6:30pm ET, she will be hosting a conversation about the film and the current state of miscarriage care. Here’s the link for that: https://nyu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_1xNcM1coSLmlMZAJCKXDlA

We are excited to support and view this important film which offers a perspective into this generally underreported experience!

If you are interested in applying for a guest residency here at MoM, please go to our website HERE: https://bit.ly/3uRgugm to find out more. BE SURE TO HURRY! Spots have been filling FAST! We hope that future tours of the space will be available soon, but they are by appointment only in Artist Enclave Historic Kenwood: “where art lives.”

Remote Artist Residency with Rachael Grad: This August at MoM

Rachael Grad is a mom of three and former lawyer who has studied and worked in the US, France, Italy, Hong Kong, and Toronto. Grad left practicing law to study painting full-time at the New York Studio School and New York University (NYU) before transferring to OCAD University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Trained as an observational painter, Grad has focused on colourful painting that blurs the distinction between abstract, figurative, and representational styles.

Recently her art practice has expanded to incorporate digital painting and collage to further recreate her observational drawing and painting. Grad combines her experience as a mother, former lawyer, and traveler into her artwork, creating art that reflects parenting moments. Her current art series include “Motherhood Hit Me Like A Train” works on paper that use trains as paintbrushes and “Mommy Mayhem” digital collages and abstract expressionist paintings.

Grad’s artwork has been shown in solo and group shows in Washington, DC, New York City, Venice, Italy, and the Toronto area. She holds degrees from Brandeis University, Duke University School of Law, and Sciences Po in Paris, France. She earned a BFA with Distinction in Painting and Drawing from OCAD University in May 2022 as the Governor General Academic Medal and Mrs. W.O. Forsyth winner. This fall Grad will start a Master’s in Fine Arts program at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Artist Statement

Motherhood is mayhem. When I became a parent, carving out time and space to create (not just people but artwork) became essential.

My current art practice is driven by an obsessive-compulsive need to document my three kids and their perpetually changing debris (meaning their messes of toys, books, clothing, and crafts). Daily household and art routines, rituals, and schedules reflect my attempt to reign in the chaos of parenting. Numbers, habits, and repetition are crucial to my sanity and survival.

There are 52 weekends in each year when my children’s school, daycare, or summer camp are closed for 65 agonizing hours in a row. To symbolize the slow passing of parenting time, I created 52 digital collages each containing 65 artworks layered together in photoshop. The artwork layers include my postcard drawings, abstract colour paintings, and paint mark experiments with toys.

Recent Mommy Mayhem series paintings are loosely based on these collages and blur the distinction between representation and abstraction. Gestural paint marks use the bright colours found in toys and messes.

In my Motherhood Hit Me Like a Train series, rolling a toy train across my artwork as a not-so subtle metaphor for being a mother artist. Toys have overtaken my home and my artwork, and they are always in mind and in my way. For my abstract watercolour on paper artworks, I reverse the ubiquitous toy train and turn it into a paintbrush.

Repetitive marks starting from observation are a way of building up unclear layers to form abstraction. Loosely based on the digital collages, I paint colourful abstract portraits of stuffed animals and toys that serve as transitional comfort objects for children as they grow and learn independence from parents.

My painting subjects reflect moments of motherhood, and my painting technique is a reference to, and mocking of, art history movements such as the machismo of the Abstract Expressionist painters. I am conceiving a visual language informed by abstract expressionism, playful mark making, and the contradiction between my dream of control and order versus my reality of constant pandemonium and mess at home. Routines, patterns, and symbolic numbers are expression in my art.

I research contemporary parent artists and their artwork including Mary Kelly (Post-Partum Document. 1973-79), Monica Bock (Maternal Exposure (or, don’t forget the lunches), 1999-2000), and Paul Campbell (Koosh Series and Remote Control Series). When painting, I think of Denyse Thomasos’ powerful gestural marks, Susanna Heller’s experimental studio practice, and Amy Silliman’s abstraction.

Museum of Motherhood Artist Residency Project

During her MOM Residency, Rachael will curate an online art exhibition of artwork made by artist mothers who manage to create artwork and keep up their studio practice while parenting. The show will include weekly blog posts interviewing participating artists to explore their work and parent experiences. During the period of her artist residency at MOM, Rachael will attempt to create a drawing or painting each day related to her “Mommy Mayhem” or “Motherhood Hit Me Like a Train” series.

You can view more of Rachael’s artwork at RachaelGradArt.com

If you are interested in connecting with Rachael, you can find her on social media @RachaelGradArt