Heiress Gallery

Threads of Connection: Sorry/Not Sorry – Confronting mother (and other) blame–healing & resistance in contemporary culture and beyond

St. Petersburg, Florida & Online

March 22-24, 2024

MORNING MEETUP

Each day of the conference we will plan on meeting first thing in the morning at 9AM at MoM. Then, we will walk over to Heiress Gallery for the events of the day. If you are coming to MoM by car GO THIS WAY: Take 28th St. South of Central. Left on Fairfield Ave. South to parking lot on left and multicolored sidewalk on right. Walk through door 2606. MoM is across the hallway and up the stairs from Fairgrounds St. Pete and DaddyKool Records. If you are arriving after 9:30 AM follow the directions below (except for Saturday midday crochet event)

DIRECTIONS TO HEIRESS GALLERY

Heiress Gallery by car: 28th St. South of Central. Left on the entrance PAST Fairfield Ave. South which leads BEHIND the Fairgrounds St. Pete to the BACK OF THE BUILDING. Follow all the way to the end. Heiress Gallery is up the stairs on the left at the back of building 7/8.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

CONFERENCE IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC VIA ZOOM & IN PERSON. You must register for the password for the Zoom Link by writing INFO@MOMmuseum.org

DONATIONS

Help MoM thrive and cover the costs of this conference by making a generous donation here or CashApp museumofmotherhood@gmail.com. Thank YOU!

Threads of Connection: Mother (and other) blame, shame and pain, with a focus on resistance and healing. Blame and shame can be self-imposed or projected by dominant social narratives that hyper-focus on the performative nature of m/otherhood as reinforced by unrealistic hegemonic constructions. This can be true for adult children reviewing familial relationships and the world writ large as well.

We encourage presenters to unpack the sociocultural domain of mother (and other) blame and the psychological, personal, professional, and media environment within which this topic is situated. Who is harmed by blame, and whom does it serve? How are oppressive systems reinforced or even sustained? How can we resist or dismantle these systems in large and small ways? What forms of resistance, peace-making, and healing can help improve our relationships?

FRIDAY	MARCH 22	MIXED ZOOM & IN-PERSON PRESENTATIONS
9:30 AM	Coffee at MoM	We gather to walk over to Heiress Gallery
10:00 AM	Martha JOY Rose	Why we’re here: Intro – suggestions, ground rules, intro Brittany DeNucci & Courtney Kessel Build
10:30 AM	Chelsea Robinson	Smash the Mom Rage -The power of a Smash Room in supporting mothers in feeling into their anger. (Zoom)
11:00 AM	Avery Delany	How Empathy is our greatest tool to deconstruct the institution of normative motherhood and intervene with “bad” and “monstrous” mothering (Zoom)
11:30 AM	Blessing Gbemisola Ogunyemi	Matricentric Feminism and the Liberating Power of Unmasking Motherhood: Unknotting Maternal Grief and Shame in Yewande Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief (Zoom)
12:00 PM	Fly Jamerson	Resisting Mother-Villain Narratives in Performance and Media through Adaptation Conference Themes and Topics (Zoom)
12:30 PM	Mariana Della Barba	How news coverage on ‘maternal burnout’ exacerbates the unrealistic perception of motherhood and leaves mothers feeling even more guilty, exhausted and sick (Zoom)
1:00 PM	LUNCH (onsite)
2:00 PM	Agnes Howard	Echoes of the Primal Scream: American Motherhood during COVID (Zoom)
2:30 PM	Emma Tam	Defining Daughterhood (Zoom)
3:00 PM	Victoria Trinko, Julia Sarewitz & Aurelie Athan	Applied Matrescence: A Paradigm Shift in Postpartum Care (Zoom)
3:30 PM	Sonia Meerai	Navigating maternal regret in the context of infertility: Intersectional and intergenerational
4:00 PM	Miranda J. Brady	Munchausen by Proxy: On a cultural fascination with selfish motherhood
4:30 PM	Mariona Visa	Revising the castrating mother figure from Psycho to Bates Motel.
5:00 PM	Merle Bombardieri	“Should I have another Child?”
5:30 PM	Vanessa Hansen	You Are Not Alone
6-7:00 PM	Vanessa Marr	Tokens of Resistance/A Mothers Work is Never Done: Embroidery Circle EVENTBRITE REGISTRATION FREE
Dinner	On Your Own
SATURDAY	March 23	IN-PERSON PRESENTATIONS ONLY (Viewable on Zoom)
9:00 AM	Coffee at MoM
9:30 AM	Amalie Vacanti	Shout Your Abortion: Signs of Change: The Impact of Billboards on the I-55 Abortion Access Route
10:00 AM	Alicia Delima	Recognizing Mother Work and Sex Work as Work under Neoliberalism
10:30 AM	Jill M. Wood	Birth(ing) Justice: Using a Birth Plan Undergraduate Writing Assignment as a Feminist Pedagogical Tool
11:00 AM	Ieva Bisigirskaitė	Challenging ‘Safe’ Birth: A Feminist Perspective on Maternal Activism in Lithuania
11:30-12:30 PM	Madison Hendry, Bag Ladies, etc. Mother Tree – crochet circle	The Womb Project; threads of connection and the roots of the Mother Tree crochet collaboration with Judy Lyons Schneider & Alice Harrison (the Bag Ladies) intergenerational conversation
12:30-1:30	LUNCH at MoM
1:30 PM	Keynote: Courtney Kessel	From witches to the weather, from maternalism to manifesto, from Talking Heads to tarot, this interactive performance lecture will wind, warp, and weave, tracing the umbilical through generations of feminist art, writing, and theory.
2:00 PM	Christine Carrig	Proudly Shamed in the USA – Art Installation w/ invitation for community collaboration
2:30 PM	Lakshmi Seshadri	Mindful Motherhood Meditation
3:00 PM	Cyntoria Meaderds	Being The Mother You Are Told to Be: a Qualitative Analysis on Mothers In Recovery
3:30 PM	Megan Welch	Othering the Mother : An In-depth Psychological Exploration of Mothering through an Ecofeminist Lens
4:00 PM	Elizabeth Charles	Thirdspace Feminist Practices for Embodying Motherhood in Academia
4:30 PM	Meredith Gringle, Amber Welborn, Tracy Nichols	“…you know, bad news travels fast”: A narrative case study of caring for mothers and infants experiencing substance exposed pregnancy (Zoom)
5:00 PM	Nathalia Martinez-Baca	Mamá; My grandmother, eight children, and Mexican healthcare outcomes
5:30-6:00	PIZZA ONSITE
6:00-7:30 PM	Emily Fitzgerald and Molly Sherman	The People’s Clinic for Reproductive Empathy
SUNDAY	MARCH 24	MIXED ZOOM & IN-PERSON PRESENTATIONS
9:30 AM	Coffee at MoM
10:00 AM	Victoria Bailey	All The Ways, Always–An Ode to Mother Blame (Zoom)
10:30 AM	Loïs van Albada	Nightbitch, the Bad Mother, and the Monstrous-Maternal
11:00 AM	Heather E. Dillaway	I Did Not Plan on This: Abrupt Shifts in Motherhood
11:30 AM	Batya Weinbaum	MOTHER: Shame Blame and Pain; the Impact of Resistance and Healing
12:00 PM	Freshta Ahmadzai	Decolonizing Mothering and Care; Labour mama was skilled, her labour had value & she was a trying m(other) (Zoom)
12:30 PM	Sushree Routray	Whispers of Rebellion: Matricentric Feminist Insights into Maternal Ambivalence in Contemporary Indian Fiction (Zoom)
1-2:00 PM	LUNCH ONSITE
2:00 PM	Frésange Maleka	Maternal Vaccine Hesitation and the HPV Vaccination: Exploring the Complex Interplay of Loss Aversion, Emotion-Laden Choices, and the Impact of Normative Motherhood (Zoom)
2:30 PM	Alicia Campos Massó	Women Cultural Agents and the Extermination of the Beguines, the Caring Mothers.
3:00 PM	Collin Xia	Black Motherhood and resistance in the Pre-Emancipation British Caribbean (Zoom)
3:30 PM	Sylvie Cote	A Matrifocal Reading: Monstrous Motherhood in Domenica Ruta’s Addiction Memoir With or Without You (2013) (Zoom)
4:00 PM	Closing Keynote: Andrea O’Reilly	Towards a Literary Theory and Criticism of Matricritics: Begin with the mother in her own right” to deliver “new meanings of motherhood and transform maternal thinking itself (Zoom)
5:00 PM	Group Closing & Dinner	In the Museum of Motherhood

*Paid registrants receive a discounted entry to the Fairgrounds St. Pete the weekend of the conference

Special thanks to Heiress Gallery for hosting the MoM Conference and associated exhibits March 16-31, 2024 and to Liliana Beltran for making the art exhibit happen!

Closings for a Cause: Founded by Deanna Barcelona to align her mortgage business with a passion for giving back to the community. Refer someone you know in need of a home loan solution to my team. Mention closings with a cause to benefit the Museum of Motherhood. At the closing table, we’ll make a commitment to present a check to MoM in YOUR name.

The Journal of Mother Studies (JourMS): peer-reviewed, international, interdisciplinary open-access, digital humanities hybrid project focused on the field of interdisciplinary study devoted to the issues, experiences, topics, history, and culture of m/others, mothering, and motherhood.

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Can you answer this question? How many people wept tears of gratitude on Saturday at the Museum of Motherhood, either because they felt ‘seen’, ‘heard’, or because they accessed the information they’d been seeking?

The answer is THREE, in addition to the other amazing people we had the pleasure of interacting with. We witnessed the overwhelmed military mom, a traveler from Dallas, and a son who recently lost his mother and was looking for connection. They all dabbed tears from their eyes. Since moving to The Factory in St Pete, we are greeting approximately 1,200 people a month with a mission of informing and inspiring lives while remaining free and open to the public. We are able to do this because of your generous donations.

The non-profit world is hard. It’s a fact that many museums struggle to maintain their collections, buildings and staff. MoM currently has over a dozen community volunteers, a devoted director, a strategic team for infrastructure building and fiscal growth, a commendable collection of mother-made art, and a mission of taking our rightful place in the museum world.

For twenty years, on a shoestring budget, with an unrelenting commitment to thrive, founder Martha Joy Rose has championed the Museum of Motherhood, first through its New York non-profit status with the Motherhood Foundation Inc, to the MaMaPaLooZa Festival, to the streets of Seneca Falls, to Manhattan College, to the Department of Gender and Sexuality at USF in Tampa, to St Petersburg, Florida.

In 2019, the MOM Art Annex 501c3 was approved for Florida non-profit status. Then, the pandemic. MoM pivoted to mentor eighteen interns from around the world with a variety of projects and made its facility available to over a dozen artists in residence supporting mother made art, literature, and performance. Post-pandemic, from 2022-2023, we conducted over 178 in-home tours featuring the artifacts in our permanent collection, hosted healthy community suppers for families in need, and participated in Localtopia. We were able to purchase the Mother Tree for our permanent collection in 2023 and make the transition from the MOM Art Annex office to The Factory in the Arts District of St. Pete.

The Time For MoM’s Sustainability Is Now

We are poised for success. Our ducks are in a row, our noses are clean and our strategy for success is in place. All we need now are the partnerships, dollars, and donors to take this museum production to legacy status. Our goals are to continue to build out community partnerships. This year we added the Fairgrounds St Pete, Heiress Gallery, Girls Rock St Pete, and Naaman Creative to our team of community collaborators.

Our space at The Factory is staffed and ready to greet you. Exhibitions since our opening in September have included Amy Wolf’s wearable collection, and Alexia Nye Jackson’s Mother: The Job. Plans are underway for our annual spring MoM Conference, and future exhibits with Madison Hendry and Christen Clifford.

Please Donate Today

Our Go Fund Me has launched with a goal of raising $30K. (These dollars have already been matched for our 2023 budget). Now we need to raise the rest! We will be using this money to pay our rent, keep our lights and phone on, and to make our website ADA compliant.

Donations can be made by Check and addressed to 538 28th St. N. St Petersburg, FL 33713, through our Go Fund Me, or on our website. Your support is critical to our success. LINK TO OUR GO FUND ME IS HERE.

Join our year-end fundraiser for the Museum of Motherhood! We need your support to keep the rent paid and the lights on! — Fundraiser Museum of Motherhood end of year 2023

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