Modern art history has long dictated that one cannot make art while raising children. This “awful dichotomy,” as painter Alice Neel put it, pitted artmaking against caretaking and assumed that the best art was made at the expense of relationships. But beginning in the 1950s and extending into the 1980s, a group of artists gathered around Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) in San Francisco rejected this dominant narrative. Delving into the archive, where the traces of motherhood have not yet been erased from official history, Jordan Troeller analyzes this remarkable moment as it unfolded in collaborations between Asawa, Merry Renk, Imogen Cunningham, Andrea Jepson, and Sally Woodbridge. For these women, motherhood was not an essentialized identity, but a means to reimagine the terms of artmaking outside of the patriarchal policing of reproduction. Insisting that their labor as mothers fueled their labor as artists, they redefined key aesthetic concerns of their era, including decoration and domesticity, public sculpture, and art education. Drawing on queer theory and feminist literature, Troeller argues that in belatedly accounting for the figure of the artist-mother, art history must reckon with an emergent paradigm of creativity, one that embraces reciprocity, instead of reputation, and futurity, instead of innovation.

Jordan Troeller is Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History and Aesthetic Practice at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg. Her awards include the 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant, the Freigeist Fellowship of the Volkswagen Foundation, and research grants from the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Henry Moore Foundation, and the German Research Foundation (DFG). As Principal Investigator, she leads “The M/Other Project: Creation, Procreation, and Contemporary Art,” (Volkswagen Foundation), and is Co- Principal Investigator in the research group “TransExil: Negotiations of Aesthetics and Community in Post-Revolutionary Mexico.” Her book Lucia Moholy: Exposures came out with Hatje Cantz in 2024.