Feminist art and the maternal

Description

Breaching the taboo -- Intersubjectivities: Mary Kelly's post-partum document -- Maternal care: Mierle Laderman Ukeles's maintenance art -- Mamas out of place -- Making the maternal visible: René Cox's family portraits -- Loving in difference: Ngozi Onwurah's mother-daughter reflections -- Interlude: cultural and maternal notes on living through breast cancer -- Maternal mourning: a collaboration between Civia Rosenberg and May Stevens.;"Profound, provocative, and innovative, Feminist Art and the Maternal is the first work to critically examine the dilemmas and promises of representing feminist motherhood in contemporary art and visual culture. Andrea Liss skillfully incorporates theory with passionate personal reflections on the maternal, and in doing so she advances a fresh and necessary perspective on both feminism and art. Offering new research on works by well-known and emerging artists who approach feminist motherhood issues from their own knowledge and experiences, Liss explores a wide range of examples from the challenging to the taboo, including Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document, Mierle Laderman Ukeles's Maintenance Art projects, Renée Cox's Yo' Mama portraits, and Ngozi Onwurah's film The Body Beautiful. Liss considers traditional characteristics that mothers are assumed to possess, such as nurturing, empathy, and sacrifice for their children -- qualities that paradoxically have negatively defined women as 'sentimental' -- and assertively revalues them within both motherhood and feminism. Throughout, she deftly intertwines theoretical analysis with the arresting and enlightening first-person voices of artist-mothers and their children."--Www.amazon.com (Jan. 31, 2011.).