Join Us in Welcoming Mom’s Newest Interns: Kasia Nowacki and Mary Noah

We are pleased to welcome Kasia Nowacki as a new team member. Kasia attended Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and holds her Master’s Degree in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Southern New Hampshire University. Kasia’s passion is Leadership Development which she pursues through her work with the Center for Creative Leadership and teaching a Winter Term course, Leadership and Self Discovery Practicum, at Eckerd College. Throughout the last several months with MOM, Kasia has been navigating relationships with local universities with the aim of making the study of m/otherhood more accessible and more widely known. She is also leveraging her expertise in online curriculum content to build out online course content for MOM while acting as the liaison to local schools and universities. 

– Also New to MOM this Summer –

We are pleased to welcome Mary Noah as one of our summer interns. She will be working on a wide range of projects with MOM over the course of the next few months. She is a current undergraduate student in Moorhead, Minnesota, and has strong roots in the midwest. Mary has experience working in and with nonprofits like Hope Blooms (Fargo, ND) and the Smith-Lemli-Opitz Foundation (international). In her free time, she spends time at the lakes in Minnesota, plays beer league hockey during the winter, and loves attending live theatre productions. She is looking forward to working with MOM on a comprehensive social media campaign, podcast creation, and experimenting with some grant writing remotely from Long Island, NY through August.

Passionate about topics related to m/otherhood? Reproductive identities? Art? HERstory? Mothers Making Art? Mothers in Academia? Women and Gender Studies? Lifelong students can follow the Museum of Motherhood here, join our new ONLINE COMMUNITY, and we appreciate any and all support? Be sure to follow us on social media and check out our virtual storefront for merchandise!

If you have any inquiries regarding getting involved with MOM or are interested in being part of our Living Board, you can find out information about what being a board member entails under our About tab or clicking the link HERE: Living Museum Annual Volunteers – Join Us! – MUSEUM OF MOTHERHOOD (mommuseum.org)

Funnel of Dreams Film Screening Online May 22

With the goal of sparking conversations around the topic of caregivers, breadwinners, and family policy, film director Bonnie Silvestri hosts an online film screening and post-film talkback.

The film Funnel of Dreams follows Silvestri, her husband, and their child on a quest to understand the United Kingdom’s policies for families. These policies include paid parental leave, childcare services, and the children’s right to play. 

This way of life is often featured in academic presentations about Scandinavian countries, but in this film the Silvestris investigate how paid family leave affects families in the United Kingdom while they spend time together.

“In the midst of a global pandemic, we wanted to think about our work/home life paradigm and how we might improve things for a better future,” says Bonnie. “In our film, we dive into the history of motherhood, the struggle for women’s rights, and the issues related to family leave in the lives of working parents.”

Bonnie continues “When we became parents, we were surprised to learn that the United States is the only industrialized nation not providing paid family leave.” 

She explains, “We wanted to learn more about a country with a robust framework for new parents. Our short documentary film explores our personal experience with our young daughter living overseas along with interviews with parents, policymakers, and other experts.” 

The film was an official selection of the Through Women’s Eyes International Film Festival, Social and Economic Justice Festival, and the International Social Change Film Festival among others.

For over a decade Bonnie has taught courses including Women and the Law at the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee and won the 2015 Graham-Frey Civic Award from the Florida Campus Compact for outstanding contributions to the development of civic learning and engagement in sustaining participatory democracy.

Funnel of Dreams is 34 minutes in length and will be screened in our Zoom room (LINK IS HERE/ JOIN AND RSVP) at the MOM Community site on Sunday May 22. The film will be screened first with a discussion to follow for a total of 90 minutes beginning at 7PM and ending at 8:30PM EST. Hope you can join us!

#MOMmuseum #WomenMadeFilms #Families #Motherhood #MomsRising #MuseumofMotherhood #FunnelOfDreams #BonnieSilvestri #Motherhood #PaidLeave #AmericanValues #FamilyLeave #MOM #JoinMama #Civics #WomenAndLaw #Women

Why MOM, Why Now, Why You?

As April comes to a close and May begins in earnest, many of us are wondering what’s next? What’s next in our world, our lives, our finances, and our families. Spring has sprung but so have droughts, war, recession worries, and post-pandemic (or mid-pandemic) realities. One thing is for sure, we can only focus on the things within our control. That means looking around at your family, your friends, and your neighborhood and leading the way, the best way you can.

For teachers, this may mean balancing changing protocols in classrooms. For some mothers, this has meant spending time with strangers screaming in parking lots. For many, survival is just a day away.

In my experience, lurching forward with faltering footwork, leaves me staggering towards an unknown destination. When I feel like quitting, that often means some kind of relief is in sight. After months of lockdown, the personal management of grief, frustration, and fear, this new turn of the season brings hopeful possibilities.

The MOM Art Annex in Florida has seen signs of unprecedented growth. Perhaps this is because of a growing collective concern by some that basic liberties are under siege: book banning, women’s reproductive health access, and the rights of LGBTQ+, have sent some spinning in the direction of social changes spaces like ours. Or, perhaps it’s the years of hard work by so many that are finally coalescing in real MOMentum?

We presented our proposal to the local Historic Kenwood Association a few weeks ago and followed up with meetings with our councilman Richie Floyd. To that end, his solid advice was “advocacy” is all. So we created an ally document for interested friends to sign. Then, we created a petition [Link] that states MOM deserves her own space in the sun. We have spent months reworking some of our original internal document language to make sure inclusivity is front and center. Several new volunteers have joined us as well as a few part time staff persons. The Journal of Mother Studies will accept submissions through May 2022 and then go into the editorial process. We gratefully welcome Nicole Musselman (USF) as lead editor and are excited to welcome a new intern as an editorial assistant beginning June. This is all awesome stuff.

So, won’t you consider growing with us? Mother’s Day is next week. CLICK ON ANY OF THE FOLLOWING LINKS TO Celebrate a M/other you love by making a donation and putting her name on our Tribute Wall online. Support our fundraiser for the Mother Tree acquisition. Read our letter and sign our Ally form. Consider joining our team. Our Executive Fundraising Board is still seeking new members and we welcome those from all backgrounds and skillsets.

Oh, and yeah – HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY ! (Everyday is M/other’s Day). We L<3VE YOU, we love peace, we love our planet, and we’d like to see every human being valued in an equitable and sustainable world. Hang in there. Because we are all connected, because m/otherhood is otherhood, and because if there are more of us spreading light, rather than hate, more of us creating access than obstacles, and more people acting out of respect than entitled aggression – towards each other and our planet- then we just might make it! Let kindness be the currency of our lives.

Martha Joy Rose

Museum Director Martha Joy Rose presenting to the Historic Kenwood Association March 2022

MOM Welcomes Guest Artist Andrea M. Williams

Artist Andrea M. Williams

We are excited to announce our newest Guest Artist, Andrea M. Williams. A visual artist and mother of two, Andrea knows all too well the toll that motherhood can take on one’s own body, mind, and spirit and she has turned to her art as a way to heal and find peace. Andrea’s fascination with the body has led her down innovative pathways considering new ways to represent the body and its various functions.

During her guest artist residency, Andrea will continue to develop her artwork focusing on her explorations of motherhood. Continue reading to learn more about Andrea’s life and her artistic journey and about our interview with her:

Parenting is hard work. 

Becoming a parent is a profound physical, mental and emotional experience. Before I became a mom, I studied figurative art at academies in Chicago, Florence, and New York. I love the figure but more than that, I am interested in depicting the human body itself. In graduate school I discovered printmaking, which quickly became my passion. 

After graduate school, I underwent treatment for some stress-induced medical issues. I began considering the organs and systems underneath the body’s exterior. I had lost regular access to a printmaking workshop, and began carving and hand-printing relief prints at home using linoleum blocks. My work became smaller in scale. I started experimenting with chromatic inks. I drew images of organs layered with abstract linear elements. I left behind the fussiness of registering plates and printed several linoleum blocks together. I cut up prints and glued them back together in layers, adding graphite and watercolor. 

This process of assemblage has become a kind of meditation. Instead of starting with a carefully prepared drawing, I head in a direction, unsure of where I will end up. For my guideposts, I use photos of forests taken in upstate New York. Frozen cattails clustered overgrown next to a bank parking lot. Gnarled tree bark. Videos of new spring leaves softly shifting in the breeze. I think about living plants and living bodies and the connection between them. I consider what a body can do, how a body can give life, how a body can deteriorate. 

Each of my daughters was born in traumatic circumstances. My first was born 6 weeks premature and my second was born in mid-2020 during the height of the first Covid wave. Each time after giving birth, I experienced postpartum depression. My body had done incredible feats, but it now felt foreign. Over time I realized I needed to regain a balance between caring for my daughters and caring for my mental health. My art practice has become an outlet to cope with, at times, crippling anxiety. It is a meditation on what it means to be an artist, a parent, a woman.

-Andrea M. Williams 

About Andrea M. Williams

Andrea Williams is a visual artist whose mixed media works explore motherhood, birth, and the female body. During her time at the M.O.M. residency, she plans to create a suite of works on paper that join elements of relief printmaking, collage, drawing, and painting. 

Andrea received her MFA in Painting with a Printmaking concentration from the New York Academy of Art and her BFA from the American Academy of Art in Chicago. Her work has been shown in New York and Chicago. She lives and works in northwest Indiana with her patient husband and two rambunctious young daughters.

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.”