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Artists Portray the Joy and Difficulty of Motherhood

By Laura van Straaten

Madeline Donahue, whose paintings portray intimate moments of motherhood, turned to New York’s Greenwich House Pottery to adapt an image of her family in a field of flowers into a new, limited-edition vase available through Nina Johnson Gallery. Donahue, who’s based in Brooklyn, conceived the piece at Interlude Residency, founded by the artist Elsie Kagan in Columbia County, N.Y., to support artists with children. (Kagan has also curated a list of other retreats for art-making parents.) Also upstate, the artist Erica Recto has curated a show of ceramic, textile, video and painted pieces by six artists who are mothers, on view through Aug. 31 at Bes, her art space and design shop in Dutchess County that showcases work made in the region. Titled “Soft Animals,” after a line in Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” the show posits what it might look like to “let the soft animal of your body love what it loves” against the backdrop of parenthood. Recto’s own hollow, beige stoneware sculpture features textured spots, like one with suede flocking, that invite handling, while the name of the piece, “Touched Out,” — a newly popular phrase that refers to the sensory overload that can come with child rearing — says otherwise. Nearby, the Manhattan-based artist Katie Westmoreland has framed a list of art ideas that she dreamed up but couldn’t realize once her daughter, now 4, arrived. That ink-on-paper work is juxtaposed against two of the artist’s labor-intensive embroidered canvases predating parenthood. When creatives become parents, Recto says, art making can become “an escape, [a form of] time keeping, meditation, a grieving process — even liberation.”

Read the full article online on The New York Times.