Welcoming 2023 Interns & Other Activities in the New Year

MoM is pleased to welcome three new remote interns from around the country, three local high school students, and one high school student from Russia to our projects in 2023.

Two of our local high school students are from the St. Pete Feminist Club. They are working on re-organizing the library and then onto a group project to bring back to the school in March for Women’s History Month. We are also pleased to be working with a third student on graphics to enhance MoM’s ability to create merchandise relevant to our messaging. Our fourth student, working remotely from Russia, will be facilitating data collection on some of the other student’s projects. This is all super fun and exciting.

Next up, Gia and Abbey. (FYI, our feature on Laura (and Maria) ran in November. She’ll be following up on the work of Maria to help create a simplified version of our online coursework this Spring).

Hello everyone! My name is Gia and I am an undergraduate student at Rollins College majoring in art history and minoring in history. I plan to graduate next year and look forward to working in an art/history museum. I chose to start my internship journey at the Museum of Motherhood because of my interest in women and gender studies in the art world. I look forward to all the new ideas I will learn during my time here!

During the spring semester, I aim to create a timeline from the 1960s to the present that connects some of the ever-changing ideas of feminists, mothers, and artists. There will be an inclusion of artworks that I deem to perfectly express the feeling and stigma of motherhood during each decade. I am hoping to map this digitally and set it up as a digital project that others can contribute to as well.

My name is Abbey Wrobel. I’m a current senior at the University of Utah studying history. I am especially interested in women’s history. I plan on attending grad school after I graduate to continue my history education. My dream is to one day be a history professor who specializes in teaching women’s history.

During my time with MoM, I will be working with an editorial team to co-create the Journal of Mother Studies (JourMS), 2023 issue. I have already begun to collate the submissions to the spring MoM Conference and the journal. Now Joy is looking for a lead editor for the project who can spearhead the process. I am looking forward to learning from them over the summer as we work to make the journal happen and get it published.

Two Event Reminders

If you’ve been in touch at all with us in the new year, then you’ve probably talked with Connie, our new Membership Director. While we are still ironing out our system-wide forms, we are getting there! If you are having trouble RSVPing to something or need help with any of our online forms, then please contact Connie@MOMmuseum.org

  • -Join us for a Feminist Consciousness Raising Sunday, Jan 8th in person or on Zoom
  • RSVP to attend one of our Mothers’ Club meetups
  • -Register & Pay the Earlybird special for the MoM Conference 2023 (thru Jan 15th)
  • –RSVP for everything here.

Final PUSH to 2022 Fundraising Goals and A Big Move!

Donate To MoM

This is our final countdown to the Mother Tree Fundraiser in 2022. As of now, we are over halfway to our goal of purchasing this one-of-a-kind artwork from world-renowned paper-maker Helen Hiebert, on loan to MoM until June 2023. We have raised $13,300 towards the purchase price of $25,000. That means only $11,700 left to go! Won’t you help us clinch the deal? The Mother Tree is a seven-foot high handmade sculpture installation featuring single strands of thread which have been crocheted by over 400 participants around the world. Helen is an internationally acclaimed artist, author and educator. The Mother Tree is currently onsite at the MOM Art Annex. She is impactful, lovely, and represents the connection we have to the earth, our families, and our community. Any amount, no matter how small, helps us to secure her for our permanent collection. Your name will be added to the webpage and also onsite at MoM. You can write a check, donate through Paypal or go through our GoFundMe. We thank YOU!

Read on to see all our successes in 2022 and see what we hope to achieve in 2023.

This year we commenced with BIG goals at MoM. In addition to branded content, thanks to our summer interns, we revamped our mission statement to maximize inclusivity while staying true to our goals of elaborating on the art, science, and herstory of m/others.

We recommitted to serving up visible, educational, and inspiring offerings by conducting onsite tours on a regular basis. These tours oftentimes included children. We added to our collections and exhibits, built a vestibule to better enable visitors to view our interior space regardless of pandemics, and held postpartum groups and mothers’ playdates in our garden.

Easy QR MoM Donation with Stripe (Secure Payments)

New team members came on board. Specifically, we welcomed legal advice from local lawyer Larry Dillahunty, and are most pleased to be working with Deborah Gelch in the position of Strategic Advisor, Elena Rodz in website development, Marcile Powers as Arts Facilitator, and Connie Burgess as our new Membership Director and Community Laison.

We continued with our Residencies both remote and onsite, as well as our internship program, adding four new interns poised to start work in the new year. Our international relationship with MAMA collaborators continued, bringing online art exhibits from around the world.

We heartily thank the neighborhood of Historic Kenwood and the Artist Enclave for their great work on the Studio Tour as well as Winter in the Woods, and Bohemia Night at (Kenwood Gables) which MoM participated in, and also want to shout out to SPACEcraft for including us in their latest round of installations in St. Pete, and St. Pete High School for inviting MoM to present at the Art & Feminist Club.

One piece of big news is that our director, Martha Joy Rose took up permanent residence in Florida this year, relinquishing her NY-based teaching job at Manhattan College and further cementing her commitment to MoM locally in St. Petersburg.

We thank you Living Board 2022, Zabrina Shkurti, Nicole Musselman, and two-term Residency Coordinator Tracy Sidesinger. The Annual MoM Conference and the Journal of Mother Studies (JourMS) are ongoing with this year’s hybrid conference scheduled for March 24-26. (Join us online or in person).

This year, we wrote two grants: one was denied and we are waiting to hear on the second one. We received one anonymous foundation award in the amount of $1,000, and we thank all our new members and donors! While our needs are great, as is the case with many non-profits, we have persevered through geographic moves, personnel changes, pandemics, and great and we have SURVIVED and THRIVED!

MoM belongs to you – the public, our members, and our community. Please consider getting involved or making a donation today. Use our donation link or checks can be sent to 538 28th St. N St Petersburg, Florida 33713. Help us GROW!

Donate To MoM
  • SPACEcraft, Photo by Sandra Sonik
  • Marcile Powers, Photo by Sandra Sonic
  • SPACEcraft, Photo by Sandra Sonic
  • SPACEcraft Mama!
  • SPACEcraft, Joy and Connie
  • SPACEcraft founders Mitzi Gordon & Carrie Boucher
  • Journal of Mother Studies
  • Martha Joy Rose, St. Pete High School
  • Bohemia Night, Kenwood Gables
  • Bohemia Night Kenwood Gables
  • Tour MoM Alexis Baum
  • New Art
  • MoM Postpartum Group
  • Deborah Gelch and Connie Burgess
  • Feminist Club
  • MoM’s Playdate
  • MoM Playdate
  • Playdate at MoM
  • MoM Merch
  • Winter in the Wood
  • Winter in the Wood
  • Gloria Munoz- St Pete Poet Laureate and former MoM Resident
  • MoM Tour w/Family
  • Babies are the Future!
  • Summer visits/ Birth Chair
  • Friends from NY Visit MoM

Batya Weinbaum, Goddesses, and the Season of Light

‘Tis the season of grace and friendship. Let us shine our lights brightly and wide. Let us reflect on the past as we approach the new year. Let that include in our reflections a little understood, often neglected vast herstory of Goddess-wisdom from within the pagan evolutions of this holiday season rooted in mystical wisdom and earth worship.

As the director of the MoM for almost twenty years, I have met with academics, artists, and m/others from around the world. They often share elaborative perspectives on women’s issues, family studies, and feminism. I often meet people who have lived experiences vastly different than my own. They always inspire.

For example, artist, scholar, and Femspec editor, Batya Weinbaum arrived onsite at MoM for a month of mural-making and herstory speaking at the beginning of December. Everyday, there is some new story. Beginning with her early years in Manhattan as a young feminist participating variety in consciousness-raising collectives to her systematic sharing of stories of art-making and land-living. Batya regularly teaches college coursework, hosts online art circles, and speaks at international gatherings. For me, she has become a wise, welcome daily fixture onsite at MoM, where young families regularly visit to hear her stories and where we collaborate on some art-sharing circles.

  • Batya Weinbaum Mural at Museum of Motherhood
  • Batya Weinbaum Mural at Museum of Motherhood
  • Batya Weinbaum Mural at MoM
  • Feminist Circle Art-Making at MoM
  • Family Hannukah in the Feminist Playhouse
  • Batya Weinbaum

Batya is a graduate of Hampshire College and a mosaic muralist acclaimed for an eight year art installation project on Isla Mujeres, Mexico, where images of fertility goddesses from around the world and across cultures were assembled in large figurines in order to lend strength to the Maya fertility goddess, IxChel. Her work elaborates on the Neolithic period, influenced by the works of Marija Gimbutas, Riane Eisler, Monica Sjoo (The Great Cosmic Mother) and Elizabeth Barber (Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years), who discuss periods of human history when motherhood was not a liability but something to be revered.

While visiting the MOM Art Annex, she will be constructing a fertility goddess mural from 6000 BCE. She believes women need to get in touch with origin myths in order to be strong women today. I agree!

This energy is significantly meaningful for students of all ages. Beyond contemporary celebrity icons, it is important to channel the power of the little studied leaders of a more female-friendly, woman-centric world.

Dr. Weinbaum’s contributions to MoM will serve up inspiration as well as a powerful legacy of connection to community members touring the MOM Art Annex as we build together towards our vision of a Museum of Motherhood here in St. Pete.

“Batya’s work hits on so many different levels for women, whether or not they’re mothers or feminists… And even in our current political climate, I think all women can and will find a unique resonance with this booming goddess that she’s installing at MOMMuseum. For me personally, as someone who has always struggled with balancing humility and pride, Batya’s raw, bold work inspires bravery and pride in addition to capturing the colorful joys that mothers contribute to a community.” – Dannie Snyder, Artivist & Educator 

BIO: Batya Weinbaum is a visionary artist whose works have been sold at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore, the Oberlin Art Museum, and many galleries in NY, Boston, VA, OH, Hawaii and Michigan as well as Mexico. She has been active in the Association for the Study of Women in Mythology. Some of her work can be seen at goddess vibe.org. Dr. Weinbaum teaches online at Boston College in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, and American Public University. She earned her doctorate at UMass Amherst, her Master’s at SUNY Buffalo, and her Bachelor’s at Hampshire College. She has published numerous creative and critical works, including award-winning essays, fiction and poetry. She was a cofounder of the Feminist Mother’s and Their Allies Caucus and Task Force in National Women’s Studies Association, where she petitioned for child care, and has published extensively about the impact of motherhood on grassroots political organizing in Palestine/Israel, in numerous journals and anthologies. 

Great Cosmic Mother

As Batya writes, “A museum dedicated to the study of motherhood deserves a message from the past via an image of a goddess, a fat fecundity image seated on a throne flanked by lions from Catal Huyuk now in Turkey, conjuring up shrines where goddesses were revered for giving birth.”

Ms. Weinbaum splits her time between Floyd VA and Cleveland Hts, OH, is happy to grant interviews about the project. Her art, publications, workshops and adventures can be followed on IG #divinefemimineartworkshops

More on Goddesses Brooklyn Museum [here].

Yours in Affirmations for World Peace, Feminist Equalities, and Friendship,

Martha Joy Rose, Director

M.A.M.A. Issue 53 – Jessica Caldas

The Museum of Motherhood, ProCrete Project, the Mom Egg Review present M.A.M.A. Our collaboration celebrates the intersection of art and words. Wherever we live, work, and play, the art of motherhood is made manifest. #JoinMAMA  @ProcreateProj  @MuseumOfMotherhood @MERliterary

ART

BIO: Jessica Caldas is a Puerto Rican American, Florida and Georgia based, artist, advocate, and activist. She completed a residency at MoM onsite in 2022. Her work connects personal and community narratives to larger themes and social issues. Caldas has participated in numerous emerging artist residencies, including the Atlanta Printmakers Studio in 2011, MINT Gallery’s Leap Year Program from 2012-2013, The Creatives Project form 2018-2019, Vermont Studio Center in 2020, and was the Art on the Atlanta Beltline AIR in 2020-2021. Caldas was awarded The Center for Civic Innovations 2016 Creative Impact award, named Creative Loafing’s Best of ATL Artist for 2016 and 2015, received the City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs Emerging Artist Award in Visual Arts for 2014, and was a finalist for the Forward Arts Foundation’s Emerging Artist Award in 2014. Her work has been featured at Burnaway, ArtsAtl, Creative Loafing Atlanta, Atlanta Magazine, Simply Buckhead, and more. Her work has been shown at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA and is included in the collections of Kilpatrick Townsend, The City of Atlanta Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Kyoto International Community House.

In her advocacy work, Caldas has spent time lobbying for policy at the local level in Georgia and spent time with the YWCA Georgia Women’s Policy Institute at the 2016 general assembly to assure the passage of the Rape Kit Bill and in 2016 to stop HB 51 in 2017, a bill that would have harmed the safety of sexual assault survivors on college campuses.

Caldas received her Masters of Fine Arts degree at Georgia State University in 2019 and received her BFA in printmaking from the University of Georgia in 2012. She currently runs Good News Arts, a small community arts space and gallery in rural North Central Florida.

Jessica Caldas

Statement

My work is driven by personal experience and its connection to contemporary and historical issues. Overall, my work addresses the complexities and intricacies of care and identity in our current culture. I seek to make challenging experiences accessible to those without the same somatic knowledge while still engaging in conversation and confrontation. In my practice, I incorporate layered, labor intensive drawings, collage, sculpture, performance, et al, into fully realized mixed media works and immersive installations. Within my work, the viewer is met with bodily experiences that mirror the complexities of the stories I share, with a focus on shared knowledge, awareness, empathy, and change.

My recent work is mostly divided in two ways:
1. Focus on the daily lived experiences of women; their triumphs, their struggles, and everything in between in several bodies of work which reflects on the complicated spaces, both personal and public, that women inhabit and move through.
2. Exploration of the complexities of identity where family history, cultural and social influence, politicization, and personal desire are both at odds and overlapping. In this exploration identity becomes a fact-based excavation of personal history alongside a kind of fictional mythological world building.

My artistic process has become a slow one. Where once I worked quickly, and almost frantically, I have learned in the years since completing my graduate work  that a slower, more methodical approach serves me and my work much more completely than the ways I used to create. I spend an inordinate amount of time, months and sometimes longer, reading, writing, and researching ideas, stories, and concepts that inform the work I am creating. I probably spend more time thinking about the work I will make than actually producing it, because by the time I have gotten to the point of making, I have a lot of knowledge about where I am going and what I want from the work. This is not to say that I create without reacting to what is happening, because that is another important part of my practice. Much of my production is also organic and reactionary as well. I like the ability to respond to change, materials, problems, and other things that happen in the studio as they happen, rather than strictly adhering to a plan. I find that flexibility has produced far better work than rigidity ever does. It is more real and more realistic.

As for my journey, I am one of those fortunate people who have been creating my whole life. I was privileged enough to be surrounded by art from a young age, and to be surrounded by people who took art seriously and supported my desire to practice art professionally. So going to school for art was never an issue.

(Quote from the art journal: an online journal of art and cultural commentary. Link: https://www.theartsection.com/caldas)

WORDS

Dayna Patterson is the author of Titania in Yellow (Porkbelly Press, 2019) and If
Mother Braids a Waterfall (Signature Books, 2020). Her creative work has
appeared recently in Duende, EcoTheo, and Gulf Coast. She is the founding
editor-in-chief of Psaltery & Lyre and a co-editor of Dove Song: Heavenly Mother
in Mormon Poetry. She was a co-winner of the 2019 #DignityNotDetention Poetry
Prize judged by Ilya Kaminsky. daynapatterson.com