Singer, Songwriter, Drummer, Artist & In, Actor & Independent Scholar Polly Wood
The most recent addition to our residency program has been Polly Wood, MFA, MA an accomplished singer, songwriter, drummer, artist, actor and independent scholar. In her various areas of expertise and representative media, Polly strives to focus on the “preservation of the sacred feminine.” Through her residency, you will come to see her passion for her art, her community, her love for family and her vivacious spirit.
Polly began her artistic journey through fifteen years of dance training and performance in the styles of tap, jazz, ballet, acrobatics. Dance and youth theatre led her to study performing and visual arts in college, where her focus shifted towards Acting. Prior to graduating, she took a hiatus to grow as a musician and artist, gaining performance experience and inspiration from creative collaboration within her community. It was also during this time she explored her passion for the female experience of pregnancy and birth. Building up a career as a doula– a non-medical professional child-birth assistant- she provided support to women and families throughout their pregnancy, and the process of labor, delivery, and early post-childbirth experiences. She also led mother-baby movement classes, birth-art-workshops, artfully created plaster belly casts for over 50 beautiful pregnant bellies, and produced and choreographed A Birth Dance–a modern dance performance and community birth celebration.
Almost a decade after dropping out of performing arts school, Polly returned to college with a toddler in tow to complete her Bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Integral Studies. From there she earned a Master’s degree in Women’s Spirituality, and an M.F.A. in Creative Inquiry, both from New College of California. She focused on global economics & the sacred feminine; cross-cultural rites-of-passage; ritual performance and art as a sacred practice. Her master’s thesis The Menstrual Origins of Money was published in 2006. As a singer-songwriter-drummer Polly has performed her original music across the United States and bit in Canada. Much of her visual art over the years followed the themes of pregnancy, birth and the divine feminine in the embodiment of whom she calls Radwoman.
Above are samples of Polly’s visual artistic works. From left to right: Radwoman Placenta Power (1), Radwoman Fire Songs (2), Radwoman Earth Mother (3), Miss River’s Moon (4), Birds of Change 2 (5), Into the Nest (6), Birds of Change (7), Tree of Life of Instillation (8 & 9).
As a multi-disciplinary artist, Polly’s creative work goes where she feels most lit up. Most recently her passions have come full circle to a creative pursuit of her youth: Acting. This past year offered her baby steps into entering the film & television industry. She is represented by the talent agency Phirgun Mair Worldwide. Feeling grateful for her agent and loving the auditions that come her way, she looks forward to booking future gigs.
This is Polly’s third engagement with the Museum of Motherhood. In early 2010 she curated a 12-week Sacred Feminine exhibit online and later that year was a guest artist for the Mamapalooza/M.O.M. Conference in New York City.
After nearly two decades of birth & postpartum work; visual/performing arts and scholarship focused on themes of mothering, the sacred feminine and rites-of-passage, Polly comes to the M.O.M residency to create What Is Left in an Empty Nest?
Inspired by a recent phone conversation wherein she offered (both ‘good’ and embarrassingly, ‘bad’) advice to her daughter regarding one of her college assignments, Polly envisioned what would happen if she were able to take and apply her own advice as easily as it was for her to dish it out. The next step became evident, and applying for the M.O.M residency was a part of that.
Polly is looking forward to being Artist-in-Residence at the M.O.M Art Annex, as well as experiencing what unfolds as she engages both her personal community and the Museum of Motherhood community in offering their ‘advice’ towards her creation. In addition to using this collective advice the help stitch and weave the nest together, Polly will be working with themes of grief, emptiness and expansion that can arise when children leave home -whether to spread their wings on their own, or to spend time with another parent- as well as the theme of invisibility that can accompany the gift of being in a step-parent role. Polly will be building an ‘empty nest’ for the Museum of Motherhood, both highlighting a common experience and as a personal rite-of-passage.
We can’t wait to have Polly back as a returning resident artist and are so grateful to have her fantastic contribution to M.O.M.’s archives.
To learn more about Polly, her amazing works, and any additional publications, please check out these links to her personal website, additional Resume, and projects:
Also be sure to follow her on Insta and FB for updates as well as more of her thoughts on our residency!
Instagram: @ms._polly_wood
Facebook: Polly Wood
If you are interested in applying for a 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.”
Today we would love to highlight our first virtual MOM Resident for 2021-2022, Rebecca Louise Clarke! Rebecca is an author, scholar and media artist who is interested in the ways mothering and memory are depicted in museums. Her book Representations of Mothers and the Maternal in Museums, to be published in early 2023 by Routledge is currently in development, and examines the ways mothering is represented in museum collections and exhibitions. As part of her research during her residency over the next nine months, Rebecca is doing an in-depth case study of the Museum of Motherhood (M.O.M). Her analysis seeks to discover ways that experiences of mothering as voiced by mothers themselves, can challenge heteronormative, stereotypical ideals about motherhood and how innovative museum practice can disrupt conventional ideals about motherhood. Those of us here at MOM wanted to let you get to know Rebecca along with her work, thoughts, and insight from our Q&A with her on September 6th, 2021. Be sure to also follow us on social media for updates from her throughout her residency with us!
Q. What led you on your path toward becoming an author, scholar and media artist interested in depictions of mothering and memory?
Storytelling came to me really early on. I remember sitting on the stool at the kitchen bench asking my Mum everything about her life and hearing her stories for hours. I was always making up rhymes and basically living in my own head for the first 18 years of my life. I hated school and rules and although I loved to learn, I was a rebel and a loner at heart. I felt that no one saw the world as I did. When I reached late high school and was able to study literature and drama with teachers that were deep thinkers, my brain woke up. I think it was because, for the first time it seemed, they asked us kids, ‘what do you think?’
Then I went to university to study art, the only thing I really felt equipped to do. I never knew how I would eventually make a living. I did the odd jobs. A friend once told me I should do waitressing because I was ‘bubbly’ (I’m not) and I laughed because I knew it would never work out with my bad attitude. When I learned more about academic lecturing as a job and the route that people had taken to get there, I knew that this could be my ticket (or as my kindred poet Charles Bukowski liked to say, ‘the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them’.…) to keep writing, to keep doing what I felt was the one thing I knew how to do, and to be able to have enough money to at least be able to pay my bills. As it turns out, the academic path has rewarded me with so many riches. It has given me opportunities to travel far and wide, to get published, and has kept me on a straight and narrow path when I could have easily fallen in the cracks. For years, my love was cinema. I learned everything I could about it. I had dabbled in philosophy and psychology, but what writers had to say about cinema was far more thought provoking to me. They looked at subjectivity, the way we see things, and analysed stories in an obsessive way that always felt natural to me. I then started curating events and exhibitions. I see now that my work has always been related to memory. I am kind of obsessed with it. I love talking to people about their memories. When I finally had a child (there was much thought and preparation before my daughter came into being) I wanted to see if I could somehow incorporate my mothering into my academic work, or at least have them co-exist in a harmonious way. It felt insincere and pointless to strive to think and talk about things that weren’t related to my current all-consuming experience of motherhood. And so, I decided to seek out mothering in my scholarly field of museum studies.
Q. What has been your most memorable experience through your work so far? Does it include crafting your soon to be published book Representations of Mothers and the Maternal in Museums?
When I have felt heard. It doesn’t happen all the time.
I presented a lecture on the representation of mothers in museums that included some of my own personal reflections. There was one academic, a mother herself who afterwards, told me she just got it. We were both emotional. I could have hugged her. It reminded me why I write and do art in the first place.
All this research will end up in a PhD based at Monash University’s Faculty of Information Technology and in a book published by Routledge due out next year, Representations of Mothers and the Maternal in Museums.I’m hoping to do a lavish launch of this book, probably online, to connect with people interested in this topic and to connect like-minded people with each other in stimulating dialogue.
Q. What would you identify to be common themes in both popular or general media in their portrayal of mothers and memory?
I find that generally, at least in mainstream media and Hollywood narratives, mothers are still being placed in a Madonna/whore dichotomy. So real discussions about the complexities of mothering are not happening in that space. I believe that in-order for those stereotypical narratives to change the storytelling tools themselves need to change.
Q. Do you think themes and perceptions are changing? Are they stylistic changes or do you feel they are spurred by changes in cultural perspectives of motherhood changing?
This pandemic is a force of change that I can’t even comprehend yet. It will be interesting to see how public perception of parenting is going to be affected in the pandemic. In Australia at least, there is more discussion happening in the public sphere about the labour of care. The weight of all the lockdown restrictions we have undergone has landed on mothers’ shoulders. We are expected to supervise our children’s home learning and to also somehow earn a living . It is completely unmanageable. There will be a cost. And who do you think will pay the price? There is a lot of anger coming out because of this and I hope that some productive changes can come out of this catastrophic time.
Q. How do you think heteronormative views have affected depiction of motherhood through history? Do you think there is a visual and marked difference when a female mindset guides the narrative?
I think there is certainly a marked difference between when a carer is talking about motherhood and when someone who doesn’t know kids tries to talk about it. I had so many ideas about how kids should be raised before I had a kid. When ideals meet everyday life, things get challenging. I never took into account how much becoming a mother would change me. And not just in that superficial way that TV sitcoms would have you believe. In a physical sense, I am changed completely. These things are hard to express in words and so I am finding, sound and image are helping me articulate stuff that I don’t fully understand myself, at least consciously. Maternal scholars talk about how when a child is born, there is also the birth of a mother. And it really is like that. In early motherhood, I had to search hard to find people that I could talk to about how I was feeling. Eventually I made contact with a psychologist who specializes in perinatal psychology. And everything I mentioned, the experience of reliving my own childhood, forgotten pieces of myself re-emerging, being struck by physically painful feelings like I had been abandoned, crazy anxiety… she basically said, ‘oh yes, I see this a lot’. But of course, to voice these feelings, there is a certain amount at stake. And so, it’s easier to perform motherhood in a way that we are told is acceptable. But how exhausting it’s that?
I have found, and my fellow maternal scholars have expressed this too, that talking about my research is often met with emotional responses and at times, the topic of motherhood can be way too confronting for people. Even if you aren’t a mother yourself, well, we all had one and there is often trauma attached to mothers or the idea of motherhood.
Q. How did you find out about the Museum of Motherhood? What made you want to work with MOM?
When I began my research on depictions of motherhood in museums I searched online to see if any museums held collections exclusively devoted to the topic of motherhood. In my country, Australia, there is nothing specifically mother-related out there. Of course, there are a few collections about women and women’s career achievements. But motherhood isn’t given considerable focus. It wasn’t until I had a child that I was slapped in the face with this feeling that now I had become a Mum I had been excluded from the narrative, in so many areas of public discourse and in my day-to-day interactions. When I came across MOM online, I felt validated because other curators and artists are seeing this topic as worthy of exploring in museums and not just in a tokenistic way or in an over-the-top Hollywood narrative kind of way, but they are mining the real stuff, as voiced by mothers themselves. It’s hard to believe that currently, as least in the western world, such an act is still revolutionary. To speak of one’s own mothering is daring.
Q. What are your plans for your time here at the museum?
I’m going to be studying the MOM collections and exhibitions to better understand how this unique museum represents experiences of mothers. I’m excited to see what kinds of mother-related objects exist in the museum and to find out how artists have expressed ideas about mothering in their works.
Q. What can our readers expect to see from you in the coming months throughout your virtual residency?
I’m thinking a lot about objects of mothering, or what maternal scholar, Lisa Baraitser calls ‘maternal objects’; those things that are important to us as mothers. In my writing and media art, I’ve been playing with objects that I consider important to my mothering. It’s been an enlightening exercise. It’s funny how if I think about these objects long enough, I realise I have attributed all these qualities and personalities to them. For instance, when I was meditating on the pram we had when my child was a baby, I realised how that pram represented something so solid and comforting to me. In the early days, I was terrified of all the ways she might be harmed. It was all consuming. So, it comforted me to think about this old pram, that we found second-hand, how it had carried many children before mine and even if I felt frightened and didn’t know what I was doing, this pram did, so we’d be ok. This terror, I have found, is shared by many parents if prompted enough about their parenting. But no one really talks about it. It’s this hidden secret. I felt isolated because of this secrecy. It felt that there was an unspoken agreement that it was something we just weren’t meant to talk about. I think this feeling of isolation is what drove me to look at this topic in my work. To seek out others who had felt this way. And to also hopefully, put something out into the world that others would identify with. [Follow up interview with MoM]
Rebecca’s research is supported by the Robert Blackwood Monash University/Museums Victoria fellowship. She would like to thank her PhD supervisors: Dr Thomas Chandler, Associate Professor Joanne Evans and Dr Carla Pascoe Leahy for their support.
If you are interested in applying for a 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! But we also have opportunities for virtual residencies! 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.”
MOM is pleased to welcome Mär Martinez for our September Residency at the MOM Art Annex in St. Petersburg, Florida. Mär is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in sculptural painting. Her work dissects dominance, aggression and power dynamics through the lens of a culturally-enforced binary system. She received a BFA in Painting and a BA in Art History at the University of Central Florida.
Selected Awards include: Bridge Ahead Initiative Grant, Bronfman Artist Grant Finalist, Jewish Art Salon Student Fellow, FusionFest Best in Show Award, Order of Pegasus Finalist, Katherine K. & Jacob Holzer Art Scholarship, Frank Lloyd Wright Scholar Recipient, and the Miniature Fine Arts Society Award. Select 2021 Exhibitions include: A Tiny Bit of Fire, London, GENESIS: The Beginning of Creativity, NY, Raw Fibers, FL, GALEX 55 National Juried Competition, IL, ARTFIELDS 2021, SC, Collaborative Animals, OH and Sugar, Spice, and Not Playing Nice, NY. Select 2020 Solo Exhibitions include: FRACTURE, FL, Illusions of Safety, PA, and Schism, FL. Select 2020 Exhibitions include: 2020 Florida Biennial, FL, B20: Wiregrass Biennial, AL, Feminine/ Masculine, Hungary, 2020 College Invitational, IN, and Artfields 2020, SC.
In 2020, Martinez was Artist-in-Residence at a printmaking-focused residency in Florida. She was Artist-in-Residence at The Spruce in Pennsylvania and conducted visual research through her sculptural paintings. Martinez is a member of the Dorothy M. Gillespie Foundation Advisory Board in Nyack, NY. She is Gallery Admin at Parkhaus15, a DIY artist-run exhibition space in its seminal year in Orlando, FL. She is Special Programs Director at SOBO Gallery in Winter Garden, and is affiliated with the collaborative printing press Flying Horse Editions in Orlando, FL.
In 2021, she was Artist-in-Residence at the Stay Home Residency in Tennessee, and served as the Curator-in-Residence at the Dorothy M. Gillespie Foundation in New York. She will be Resident at the M.O.M. Museum in Florida in the fall. Martinez has recently been accepted as Art and History Museums Maitland’s 2022 Artist-in-Action, and will begin her residency this winter. She can be reached at www.marmartinezart.com or @meatvoid on Instagram.
As our residency program begins to grow with each new resident, today we would love to highlight previous MOM Art Annex Resident, Psychoanalytic Psychologist Tracy Sidesinger. Tracy also works as a member of the MOM Living Board as our artist residency coordinator.
Those of you who kept up with us regularly on our social media platforms during her residency know about her background as a psychoanalytic psychologist currently practicing virtually from Brooklyn and upstate New York. Her writings and practice focus on gender and sexuality, maternal mental health, spirituality, and the arts. She is also co-founder of The New York Center for Community Psychoanalysis, an emerging nonprofit psychotherapy clinic in Brooklyn which makes psychological care accessible to all as a matter of social justice and equity. If you are interested in her field of study or would like to find out more about her previous work, you can find her writings and publications in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Journal of Mother Studies, Public Seminar, and Routledge. During her residency, she worked on a collection of essays meant to bridge psychoanalytic insight, interviews, and memoir to bear on the topic of feminine knowing. She confronted topics related to her project, as well as personal feelings on current topics in public discourse that impacted her throughout her residency. As she first acclimated to her stay and mentally prepared herself to write, she felt that having set aside this time to write about the subject of women’s knowing simply caused her to first write about what prevented her from getting to write in the first place. In light of such difficulties, she humorously reflected “why else would one need to write?”
With the additional time, she grew more pensive. As she began to work and write “the feminine,” she reflected that for her it “is knotted even subtly always within the lineage of motherhood “ and “requires some amount of knowing this lineage.” In relation to Sidesinger’s own lineage of motherhood, she reminisced about her maternal grandmother, who lived for nearly 3 decades about an hour’s drive from where she stayed. As she was nearby, and had not returned to the area since her early childhood before her grandmother’s passing, she decided to reconnect and honor her memory by spending a day at her grandmother’s “old haunts.” Memories of their time together came back to Sidesinger, with echoes of her grandmother’s indomitably fierce spirit coming through her memories of their time together, as well as posthumous recognition of her grandmother’s shortcomings as a mother. Despite recognizing such faults, she also recognized that in spite of them, she tried “really fucking hard,”and “survived eight decades when most everyone didn’t care if she lived or died.” Ultimately, through this experience she found strength in the knowledge this new connection provided her regarding her own lineage of motherhood; further assisting her in the research and writing process.
Taking breaks throughout the process to center herself and clear her mind, Sidesinger enjoyed excursions such as kayaking near coastal islands, and found solace in nature between hours of work. She especially focused on the local mangroves, finding they resemble our own growth through the connections we make with others; as we share our stories and grow by doing so, we enter new phases of life. Regardless of how experiences affect us, we continue to form new roots that tangle with those already present. Sidesinger felt this realization allowed her to better write about “the problematic structures of nuclear families” in her manuscript. As the days went by, and her residency drew to a close, she found herself bouncing between 5 different manuscripts and a continuously expanding reading list. However, she felt she had become more in touch with her inner voice, stating she felt she “needed to throw a few things back into the ocean” that would otherwise follow her, like doubt and anger. In this way, like mangroves entangle new roots with the old, she connected her stories to those of others, coming into her own and moving forward into new territory.
To learn more about Tracy, as well her keen insight and work, please check out this link to her personal website: https://nycdepthpsychology.org/
Also be sure to follow her on Instagram: @nycdepthpsychologist
If you are interested in applying for a 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.”
Contemporary visual artist Jessica Soininen-Eddis .
Today we would love to highlight our first MOM Art Annex Resident for the beginning of summer 2021, the absolutely amazing and wonderful returning resident Jessica Soininen-Eddis. MOM was ecstatic to once again open up our residency program as things began to slowly open here in the U.S.A. We could not have asked to start off on a better note after having Jessica return to continue her artistic practice at our museum and provide us with another wonderful gift. Stay tuned as below she allows us to learn about her creative process and discusses her artistic trajectory in reference to our new artwork by her in our collection.
Depicted above, Jessica’s Prior work for MOM.
Those of you who keep up with us regularly on our social media channels know about this talented artist and the previous piece of work which she gifted us in her earlier spring residency while she was here in 2018 – a beautiful mid-century modern chair painted with her own art vision, which is on view at our museum when we reopen for tours. In Soininen-Eddis’s second residency, she continued to expand on a body of work in which she painted botanical subject matter on top of her daughter’s old garments. Additionally, Founder and Director of M.O.M. Martha Joy Rose suggested she paint on a couch that was available to pair with the chair she previously painted. For the couch, Soininen-Eddis wanted to create a more overt depiction of the female form at its core. Therefore, she decided the specific part of the female form she would focus on depicting would be the vulva.
Though for some of us, this may seem a daunting task, Soininen-Eddis was up for the challenge. She has much experience in creating artworks related to the body, as she has done so since her undergraduate studies at Rhode Island School for Design (RISD). When asked about her artistic trajectory, she specifically referenced her time in Rome, Italy as part of RISD’s European Honors Program. While there, she created a piece of wearable art. In the mixed-media piece, she constructed breasts from hand-sewn bubble wrap, wax, and flour. Each individual breast was able to be snapped on and off of the garment, as her thoughts at the time when developing it were “What’s the big deal? Grandmothers, mothers, sisters have them.” Such rationalization led her to the conclusion that the same could be said for vulvas.
Though considered a taboo in the not so recent past, vulvas, and other overt physical attributes of what define women and fundamental components of women’s sexuality commingle in many cross-cultural forms of female-centered art. Depictions show direct and indirect representations of the female associated with sensuality of the female form, fertility, the power of women, temptations of the female form-the list goes on. Despite this fact, the female form in and of itself, has standard physical attributes that women have, and Soininen-Eddis wanted to celebrate the form as seen in her work Lost In the Folds (seen below). In recounting her process, Soininen-Eddis admitted that though she has painted numerous womb implied artworks with a central core before, this was the first time she had painted an anatomically correct vulva. The couch itself follows the artistic lineage of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party. Soininen-Eddis is proud to have created this work for exhibition at the Museum of Motherhood, to share it with her daughter and hopeful that students who care about women’s rights as human rights and gender studies will take something special from its creation.
Lost In the Folds, by Jessica Soininen-Eddis for The Museum of Motherhood
More info on Jessica Soininen-Eddis
In her current artistic practice, she uses worn items of feminine clothing, both her’s and her daughter’s, and then pastes them into her paintings. Soininen-Eddis applies many layers of paint to these fabric pieces so that the fabric becomes sculptural. The clothes are no longer pieces of fashion. They are now relics, which hint at the past even if it is a recent past. Garments, lingerie, intimate pieces of apparel, children’s pajamas and dresses float around flowers and botany. The flowers, just like the items of clothing, reference sensuality. When she collages paper, it covers the page just as cloth to the body. Bodily shapes and lyrical gestures commingle in her paintings and works on paper. Jessica Soininen-Eddis is a contemporary visual artist living and working outside New York City in Northern Westchester County. Soininen-Eddis received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, RI. While there, she was selected to study abroad as part of RISD’s European Honors Program, and spent the year living, studying and making art in Rome. Soininen-Eddis also received her Master of Fine Arts in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. To learn more about Jessica and her incredible art, please check out this link to her personal website: https://bit.ly/3fQi5yT
Also be sure to follow her on Instagram: @jsoininen_eddis
If you are interested in applying for a 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.”
Henny Burnett: I am a mixed media artist working mainly in sculpture and installation using a range of techniques that include casting, assemblage, photography, projections & sound. My practice is about the domestic and every day, and the stories of the objects around us – in both our homes and museums. Collecting, collating, documenting and display are key elements in my work as is repetition. I am interested in the dynamics of opposites: domestic and industrial, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless, temporary or permanent. My process has resulted in work that explores the fragility of memory; is rooted in the fabric of the home, yet presented in a historical context.
365 Days of Plastic (2020-2021) – (short version)
365 Days of Plastic is an installation and sculpture that is cast in pink dental plaster. It demonstrates one year’s worth of plastic food packaging from a single household, which is both simultaneously beautiful and horrific. This is a disturbing view of one typical family’s environmental impact. The work plays with the ambiguity of outcome and interpretation – domestic and industrial, beautiful and ugly, useful and useless.
Her girl is disappearing, erased daily by the wan heat of a January sun. Her cold only child, the daughter she palmed into life out of snow and hope after the others were wrung out of her, little white dishrags. Afterward, the white space where she’d been stranded. Every day a blizzard in her brain, a windowless room until she flexed her fingers and built her girl. Please come inside, her husband begs her nightly. But no, not yet. Here is a pink hat, daughter. Can you see how I’m trying to save you?
Sarah Freligh is the author of Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Sun Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Cincinnati Review and in the anthology New Microfiction: Exceptionally Short Stories (W.W. Norton, 2018). She was the recipient of a poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009.From MER 17 (2019). Marjorie Tesser, Editor-in-Chief.
María Linares is a visual artist and researcher born in Bogotá, who lives in Berlin. She studied Fine Arts and Philosophy in Bogotá and holds two postgraduate studies, one in Art and Public Spaces at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg and the other in Art in Context at the University of the Arts in Berlin. Currently, she is doing a practice-based Ph.D. in Fine Arts at the Bauhaus University in Weimar. Her main interests are interpersonal relations and her fields of work are public art, video, and participatory art practices.
x
As a mother, María Linares’ artistic work is guided by a consciousness of legacy and the need to dismantle structural racism in everyday life and contribute to building an empathetic world for future generations.
x
As we know, there are a number of prejudices related to each nationality. But, what does it mean “to be German”, “to be Colombian”, and how do we define the term nationality? What characterizes Colombian, German, Italian, Polish, or Indian people?
Colombian artist María Linares considered applying for German citizenship, but according to German law, this meant that she had to give up her Colombian citizenship. This circumstance raised questions about her own identity, as well as about the meaning of nationality. Out of these reflections, the artist developed VIDEO PORTRAITS, a series of videos based on prejudices around certain nationalities. For this series, María Linares did several street surveys on the images people have about different nationalities, like e.g. German, Italian, or indeed Colombian. Interestingly, Africa became a nationality and many of the prejudices collected about “nationalities” mentioned the African continent. After recollecting various testimonies, she developed scripts for performers that should play the roles of these stereotypes in their mother tongue. The exaggerated statements of the performers on the prejudices around their own nationality were intended to provoke the public and at the same time offering a way to reflect on the own prejudices concerning “the other”. During the development of this project, María Linares became pregnant and gave up for a moment the idea of applying for German citizenship. It was important for her that her child could have the option to have both German and Colombian citizenship. x
Moreover, focusing on issues of identity through artworks is a much more complex and challenging task for the artist than just questioning “nationality” and citizenship. This initial research, lead María Linares to continue with works such RE-ENACTING OFFENCES, an on-going project started 2016 in Recife (Brazil) and followed by stations in Dresden (2018), Bogotá (2018) and Berlin (2019), that questions and explores established notions of racism and discrimination present in everyday life. The project is based on a sensitization exercise by Berlin’s Anti-Bias Werkstatt (a network that follows an anti-bias approach and makes people aware of the “white privilege” in society). In this on-going project, the participants discuss their own passive and active experiences of discrimination in front of the camera. Linares’ projects are characterized by a growing sensibility on the importance of language and the numerous racist expressions present in our daily life, for instance, the initiative to rename the so-called Day of ‘Race’ and Hispanicity, a holiday celebrated on October 12 in Colombia and other Latin American countries, that reminds a supposed “discovery“ of the Americas. RENOMBREMOS EL 12 DE OCTUBRE (LET’S RENAME OCTOBER 12) consists of a petition (www.change.org/12deOctubre) to rename this day, and of a database (www.renombremosel12deoctubre.org) that collects options for renaming this holiday. The database offers the users the option to participate and give their preferences on the alternatives for Renaming October 12. This project is also part of her research on the invention of human ‘races’. According to the Jena Declaration of 2019, the concept of ‘race’ is obsolete and should no longer be used. x
An essential part of the project is to hold encounters with representatives of black and native communities, activists, ombudsmen for the rights of black and people of color, as well as representatives of institutions that could submit a renaming law, with the aim to accomplish an official name change. The encounters are documented via photographs, videos, and in a record book.
x Special thanks to Katerina Valdivia Bruch for editing the text on behalf of the Procreate Project. x What I Wish I Could’ve Done
By Margie Shaheed
if i had the words of a dictionary
in my pocket i would shake them out
onto the floor piece sentences together
to form language to tell you the mysteries
of a mother raising nine children alone
i would stockpile all of the synonyms, adjectives and verbs
for “there’s not enough food” and “we have to move again”
in a raggedy white box with one thousand lit
sticks of dynamite erasing their charred tongues
from the human lexicon forever x The Hough Riots
it was 1966 mama told us hough avenue was on fire
ignited over a ‘no water for niggers’
sign posted at a white owned bar burn baby burn rang out for six days
to neighborhood an urban war zone
at night mama cut off the lights in the house
darkness forced us to whisper
gathering at the windowsill like baby ducks
we peeked out hoping to catch glimpses
of army tanks rolling down our street
mama made it clear whose side we were on
we were black folks fighting for our rights
i wanted us to win x
“What I Wish I Could’ve Done” and “The Hough Riots” were originally published in Mom Egg Review Vol. 17, 2019. x Margie Shaheed was a community poet, writer and teaching artist and the author of seven books of poetry and prose, including Playground (Hidden Charm Press) and Onomatopoeia, Mosaic, and Throwback Thursdays (all from Nightballet Press). Her “Playground” stories can be found at http://www.timbooktu.com. Margie Shaheed passed away in 2018. x
The Museum of Motherhood, the ProCreate Project, the Mom Egg Review, and the Mother Magazine are pleased to announce the launch of a monthly international exchange of ideas and art. M.A.M.A. will celebrate the notion of being “pregnant with ideas” in new ways. This scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the creative, the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. Download the Press Release here or read about updated initiatives. #JoinMAMA @ProcreateProj @MOMmuseum @TheMomEgg
Sunshine Negyesi alias Afrooist “This is a time of grieving but also a time of great change. Covid and the emergence of the BLM movement, served as a reminder that anything is possible. Never in a million years could we have predicted such unprecedented change. So as I watch the old structures crumble I am reminded this is a period of infinite possibilities. The question now, is what world, what legacy, what vision I would I like to plant for the next generation.”
MAMA ISSUE 42 BLM
The most recent work of London based artist Afrooist, is a candid investigation into generational trauma. Her work reflects a personal journey of inquiry into her own family history, addressing the traumas which were entangled with the legacy of Colonialism .
Her work is fragmentary, working from big things which are edited down through various processes. These fragments relate to a bigger unseen picture, a remnant of something which has happened. Her art is the product of a performance where the unseen act of making is testified by her pieces.
She works across different media, ranging from live performances, painting and sculpture- using the poetry of hammering, beating, pulling, teasing and breaking, to express how her life has been lived and soaked in contrast. Her earlier works try to understand her black identity as it has been interpreted by society embracing the conflict revealed within the final pieces reflect the beautiful ugly of existence, that which is both attractive and repulsive, disquieting and squeamish, setting the viewer in an entanglement of something mucky, gritty yet sublime.
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More about Afrooist Born in London 1983 , Afrooist was raised in a biracial family in Tooting, South London. Her mother is Filipino and father from Guyana . She studied classical studies at Warwick University ( 2005 ) and trained as an early years teacher at Greenwich University ( 2016 ). Artist and singer, she began as a self taught painter, and developed the ability to deconstruct and reflect on her practice whilst studying Fine arts at City Lit London (2018). During the Summer of 2019 Afrooist made her debut solo exhibition at The Ritzy Brixton which included a live art performance ritual framed around a character she named Black Persephone in musical collaboration with Tanc Newbury and Siemy Di. A mother of 2 children, she strives to be the change she wants to see in the world. She is Co-founder with Dirish Shaktidas of a project called Futureseeds and is currently residing in South West London.
MAMA Essay: A Body Other Than My Own
by Wendy Carolina Franco, PhD
(She Her Hers)
*This essay talks about the video of the murder of George Floyd.
When the day’s headlines about Covid-19’s devastating impact on the Black community were replaced with images of Black youth screaming next to burning cars, I reacted with fear. I was in full support of the protests but scared for the protestors. My 13-year-old twin sons felt that watching the video of George Floyd’s death was necessary for me to understand the rage in the streets. P said, “If you don’t see how he was killed, you are being a coward.” I replied that decades of seeing black people suffer changed nothing and only normalized seeing black bodies being abused. They chewed on that for a minute. My teenagers have plenty of complaints about me, but they respect my opinions on social and political issues.
I am a Dominican woman with a history of serial migration, meaning that my mother immigrated first, we reunited when I was twelve, and one year later, she was imprisoned for eight years for a drug-related crime a white person would have barely done time for and was later deported. I grew up alone in New York City, dropped out of school. I eventually earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology. Now I specialize in trauma, counseling mostly minoritized people.
“Look,” I told the boys, “watching someone being murdered can be traumatizing to the viewer, and for young people of color, like you, it is particularly harmful to witness racially motivated violence.” Such videos reduce a person’s life to the day they were murdered, I argued. I suggested they focus instead on studying the origins of systemic racism, and—this part is really painful as a mother–on learning how to behave to stay safe. P and F told me they had seen many people of color die, and that their bubble of racially diverse kids had also seen all the viral videos. F said: “I don’t know if it’s good or bad for me to watch these videos, but this is the worst one I have ever seen.”
Still trying to protect my mental health, I asked them to describe it to me. I don’t know about all twins, but my boys talk at the same time and always contradict each other–it’s infuriating. This time, there were zero contradictions. P noted that the police and Mr. Floyd looked so calm that he thought it was fake, then he suddenly got scared for George Floyd. F spoke of moments he thought someone was going to intervene but were stopped. They both described a slow realization that no one was going to help. The killer stayed on top of Mr. Floyd long after his body had gone limp. P concluded that if the officer had just gotten up, Mr. Floyd would have lived.
My face awash in tears, I had a knot in my throat. Avoiding the specifics had been a way of distancing myself from George Floyd’s murder. I still think that watching black people die is traumatizing for Black people and desensitizes non-Black people to their suffering. But the reality is that children are watching.
After my sons brought Mr. Floyd’s death to life, I looked for photos of him. A beautiful vibrant
trio in a park summer outing came up. Wow, he was so tall and serious. He looked like a guy who kept his word. That little girl in his arms must have felt like God himself was carrying her. There was enough arm and chest for her to kick back and watch the world from up high. His partner was beaming, enjoying the circle they had created. It looked like a magnetic field, impenetrable and safe.
I decided to watch the video, once.
From watching the video of George Floyd’s death I learned that he was a survivor. Even in the most frightening and compromised state, Mr. Floyd had the wherewithal to control the instincts we all have. He did not fight, or attempt to run, or freeze. These responses to danger come from the most ancient parts of our brain. He mustered the focus to try to de-escalate the situation by reminding the man intent on taking his life that they are both human.
George Floyd said he was in pain, that he couldn’t breathe, communicating that he is human and like all of us will die without oxygen. He tried to calm the officers’ fears. He said he would comply with orders. He tried to adjust his body. He called out “Momma.” This dying man claimed his personhood by calling for his mother. He had profound attachments and a mother who loved him, and there is nothing more human than that. I don’t need to know how Mr. Floyd lived his life. The video of his murder showed his fighting spirit, his focus on surviving for his family, his humility, his dignity. He did not give up, but clearly understood what he was up against.
F knows what it’s like to not be able to breathe. He had pneumonia when he was eleven years old, and a young white doctor refused to take his complaints of difficulty breathing seriously. She said his lungs were clear and sent us home twice. I called my dentist, an old school Peruvian MD, who said, “GET OFF THE PHONE AND CALL 911.” My son was too weak to walk. He was rushed to the ICU where he remained for a whole week. They told me that he would have been dead in one day.
For the local protest, F made a sign that said, “I CAN’T BREATHE.” I was flooded with sadness. He was not copying the rallying cry this sentence has become, he does not know how Eric Garner died, and he was not thinking of the countless COVID-19 patients who suffocated to death, or of the air pollution our way of living creates. As much as he understands, he has no idea.
The pain of Black people only seems to bring about more pain. The Brooklyn protests we went to were completely peaceful and about 50% white, but Black and Brown protesters risk a lot more. They will be arrested and penalized more harshly than their white counterparts. Protesting also poses uneven health risks. Clueless celebrities and people who do not understand systemic racism claimed the coronavirus would be the ‘great equalizer’; instead we learned that racial privilege extends to levels of exposure to the virus and the body’s ability to fight the illness. The data on mortality shows that Black people die at three times the rate of white peers. Why do we accept so much black death?
Being the target of injustice creates a double bind, or a lose/lose situation. If you do nothing,
you suffer psychologically and emotionally, and if you fight back you risk further harm. Yet, I have to be hopeful. I see solidarity for Black people and a focus on action. I too come from pain. I can relate with feeling invisible, unimportant, and forgotten. But I will never know what is like to live in a body other than my own.
We naively think that our shared humanity is enough to experience empathy, but it isn’t, because of antiblack racism. We live in a society that assigns value to people’s lives depending on their identity. In this case, we have seen the repeated dehumanization and abuse of Black bodies, and for generations, we have labored to rationalize a world wherein skin color, gender and sexual identity, religion, place of birth and physical ability are risk factors for suffering and death. The human brain will distort reality to protect us from the idea that bad things happen to good people. As an example, victims of abuse, even in the most extreme cases, find ways to blame themselves. On a psychological level, having provoked the abuse preferable to the idea that something out of your control, like your body, can make you a target of violence. We make sense of systemic oppression by blaming the victims.
To undo lifetimes of mind-bending justifications of a racist system, we need action. Laws force people to adjust their belief systems. But we can go further and explore the barriers that keep us from seeing ourselves and our loved ones in the faces of Black victims of racist violence. Those barriers are constructs like “us and them or good and bad,” that keep us focused on our own suffering and desensitize us to the pain of others.
The Museum of Motherhood, the ProCreate Project, the Mom Egg Review, and the Mother Magazine are pleased to announce the launch of a monthly international exchange of ideas and art. M.A.M.A. will celebrate the notion of being “pregnant with ideas” in new ways. This scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the creative, the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. Download the Press Release here or read about updated initiatives. #JoinMAMA @ProcreateProj @MOMmuseum @TheMomEgg
This month marks the International celebration of Women’s Day (Sunday, March 8) and Women’s History Month.
Both of these acknowledgments demonstrate an earnest desire to understand and honor the contributions of women. Wednesday, March 11th will mark the opening event for a new exhibit at USF, Women’s and Gender Studies Dept., curated by Martha Joy Rose.
Panels featuring the four waves of feminism flank the entrance to the exhibit titled The Founding Mothers: Women in Herstory. Also on exhibit are a myriad of art pieces including works by Rose, Christen Clifford, and Kim Alderman. This timely installation brings together feminist voices throughout herstory who have challenged conventional attitudes about gendered performance and motherhood through their writing, activism, and art. A multi-media interactive exhibit encourages participants to think critically about evolving family narratives and womyn’s place in society.
Please do come visit. See the impact Mother Studies can have on your life, perspective, and the future. Write INFO@MOMmuseum.org for more info. Flyer for the opening event is here. The exhibit will be up through May 8, 2020.
See more panels here online at the Museum of Motherhood: LINK
MAMA with MOM Museum, Procreate Project and Mom Egg Review featuring Michelle Landel
Bio: Michele Landel creates intensely textured and airy collages using burned, quilted, and embroidered photographs and paper to explore the themes of exposure, absence, and memory. She manually manipulates digital photographs to highlight the way images hide and filter the truth. She then sews layers of paper together to create bandages and veils and to transform images into fragile maps.
Michele is an American artist. She holds degrees in Fine Arts and Art History. Her work has been exhibited in Europe, the UK, and the US and she is extremely proud to have been in the 2017 Mother Art Prize group show. She was awarded the 2018 Innovative Technique Award by the Surface Design Association and is represented by the Jen Tough Gallery in Santa Fe, NM and the Muriel Guepin Gallery in NYC, NY. Her upcoming art events include Imagining Identity: Contemporary Textiles at the Palo Alto Art Center Foundation in Palo Alto, CA and the Hankyu Paris Art Fair in Osaka, Japan. Michele has lived in France for over 15 years. She has three school-age children and works out of her art studio in the Paris 9th arrondissement.
Project Descriptions :
1) Who’s Afraid is intended to capture the tension between men’s anxiety of being unreasonably accused of inappropriate behavior and women’s fear of sexual harassment and assault. It is referencing the play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and the inherent tension between actors and audience that is part of theater performance and in this play the volatile and complicated relationship between men and women. To capture this, Michele started with the gaze. Specifically, the ‘male gaze’ as defined by the feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey. She began with a photograph of an anonymous woman from a clothing catalog. The photograph fits interestingly within Mulvey’s three phases of the ‘male gaze’: How men look at women, how women look at themselves, and how women look at other women. She enlarged the photograph, divided it into small rectangles, and then printed the image on secondhand bed sheets. She pieced the photograph back together and painted, using machine embroidery, the woman onto a second bed sheet – covering her skin, hair, and clothes with thread. She cut out the woman’s eyes to make the viewer uncomfortable and scared. Deliberately referencing childhood ghost costumes made by cutting out eyeholes from old bed sheets, she is engaging with the idea of spectator and specter both of which have the Latin root word ‘spect’ meaning to ‘see.’ From a distance, the embroidered figure on the sheet appears three-dimensional. The embroidered figure appears to ‘see’ the viewer when in fact the gaze is empty. The vacant gaze causes anxiety and feels powerful. Blog Link I Instagram @michelelandel I www.michelelandel.com
1) Michele Landel
For There She Was, comes from the last line of Virginia Woolf ‘s “Mrs. Dalloway” and includes over a hundred embroidered, burned, dyed and collaged images. The series emerged from thinking about all the women who are currently speaking out about their pain and trauma and are refusing to go away. To summarize this moment, Michele brewed natural dyes in her kitchen using organic materials and then dyed small scraps of fabric (a cloth baby diaper, an antique tablecloth, a stained tea towel…) to represent the physicality of womanhood and gender roles. She matched the fabrics with small paper dolls that are digitally edited photographs from clothing catalogs to show the commodification and manipulation of women’s stories. To deliberately erase the women, she burned holes in the photographs and repeatedly stitched over their faces and bodies. Yet the women are still there. Their presence is even stronger.
Closed
By Ann E. Wallace
Close the door.
She looks at me like I am ridiculous. But I only left it open for a minute.
A girl raised by a father has not
had to think much about the reasons
a family of girls keeps the door closed
and locked.
A family of girls knows
the unwanted will enter
closed doors, will penetrate locks
uninvited.
We do not need to leave
the door open for them.
Ann E. Wallace writes of life with illness, motherhood, and other everyday realities. Her poetry collection is Counting by Sevens, from Main Street Rag, and her published work, featured in journals such as Wordgathering, The Literary Nest, Rogue Agent, Mothers Always Write, and Juniper, can be found on her website AnnWallacePhD.com. She lives in Jersey City, NJ and is on Twitter @annwlace409.
TheMuseum of Motherhood, the ProCreate Project, the Mom Egg Review, and the Mother Magazine are pleased to announce the launch of a bi-monthly international exchange of ideas and art. M.A.M.A. will celebrate the notion of being “pregnant with ideas” in new ways. This scholarly discourse intersects with the artistic to explore the wonder and the challenges of motherhood. Using words and art to connect new pathways between the creative, the academic, the para-academic, the digital, and the real, as well as the everyday: wherever you live, work, and play, the Art of Motherhood is made manifest. Download the Press Release here or read about updated initiatives. #JoinMAMA @ProcreateProj @MOMmuseum @TheMomEgg
