M Word

Real Mothers in Contemporary Art

Edited by Myrel Chernick, Jennie Klein

“The M Word puts the most hallowed and fraught life relationship of all into the centre of visual culture. Working through feminist ambivalence about motherhood (in all of its myriad and motley forms), this collection offers a crucial corrective to the dearth of discussions about life choices and living tensions for creative women in art and art discourse. With a range of key feminist artists, art historians, and theorists addressing topics from Mexican feminist art collectives to the Holocaust and mothering to queer mothering, this book presents a range of rigorous thinking in textual and visual form. In The M Word, maternity, as a state, an ideology, an “image,” becomes the perfect pivot through which to examine women imagining ourselves into the sometimes incompatible roles of caring, care-taking, thinking, and making.”

- Amelia Jones, Grierson Chair in Visual Culture, Department of Art History and Communication, McGill University

Contents

Introduction (Myrel Chernick and Jennie Klein)

I. Conversations and Questions

II. Maternal Metaphors 1

 III. Contemporary Art and the Maternal: Articulating the Maternal Metaphor in Feminist Art

IV. Maternal Metaphors II, Doubleblind

V. Finding the Maternal in the Visual Field: Practice, Narrative, Images

VI. The M Word/Mother, mother

VII. Afterword

Bibliography

Contributors

About the Authors

Myrel Chernick is an artist and writer living in New York City. She has shown her text-based multimedia installations nationally and internationally, lectured widely and curated the exhibit Maternal Metaphors that includes the work of 15 international artists and has been presented twice. In addition to working with the Peculiar Works Project on an Off-Off Broadway production of the Beggars Opera she is currently writing and illustrating a hybrid novel that takes place in Paris and New York.

Jennie Klein’s primary areas of research lie in contemporary art, art criticism, feminist art, and performance art. She is a contributing editor for Art Papers and Performance Art Journal (PAJ), and a member of the editorial board of Genders. She has published in n.paradoxa, Art History, New Art Examiner, and Afterimage. Professor Klein is the editor of Linda Montano, Letters from Linda M. Montano (London: Routledge, 2005), the co-curator, along with Rebecca McGrew, of The 21st Century Odyssey: The Performance Work of Barbara T. Smith, and the co-curator, along with Myrel Chernick, of Maternal Metaphors: Artists, Mothers, Art work.