The Mother Artist
Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity
by Catherine Ricketts
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Pub Date Apr 16 2024 | Archive Date Jul 15 2024
1517 Media | Broadleaf Books
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Description
Are caregiving and creative labor fundamentally at odds? Is it possible for mothers to attend to both?
Few women artists feature prominently in the history of art, and even fewer who are mothers. How are motherhood and artmaking at play and at odds in the lives of women? What can we learn about ambition, limitation, and creativity from women who persist in doing both?
Forged in the stress of early motherhood, The Mother Artist explores the fraught yet generative ties between caregiving and creative practice. As a young mother working at a museum, essayist Catherine Ricketts began asking questions about the making of motherhood and the making of art. Now, with incantatory prose and an intuitive gaze, she twines intimate meditations on parenthood with studies of the work and lives of painters, writers, dancers, musicians, and other creatives. Ricketts takes readers through the studios of mother artists, placing us in the company of women from the past and the present who persevere in both art and caregiving. We encounter Senga Nengudi's sculptures, which celebrate the pregnant body, and Toni Morrison's powerful writing on childbirth. We behold Joan Didion's meditations on maternal grief and Alice Neel's arresting portraits of mothers and babies. And we observe the ambition of sculptor Ruth Asawa, the activism of printmaker Elizabeth Catlett, and the constancy of writer Madeleine L'Engle. The Mother Artist welcomes us into a community of creatives and includes full-color images of their work.
Part memoir, part biography, and part inquiry into the visual, literary, and performing arts, The Mother Artist contends that a brutal world needs art made by those who have cared for the vulnerable. This book is for mothers who aspire to make art, anyone eager to discover the stories of visionary women, and all who long for a revolution of tenderness.
A Note From the Publisher
-Strong literary writing that balances art criticism, biography, and memoir to appeal to educated readers and those longing for intellectual and creative stimulation
-Offers a sense of companionship in the notoriously lonely ventures of motherhood and artistic practice
-Provides wisdom and examples on the ways motherhood and creativity can be compatible, through the stories of women who have persisted in balancing these roles
-Written by a mother artist herself in the early stresses of modern motherhood
Advance Praise
“Chronicling the work and lives of mother artists, Catherine Ricketts has written a sprawling and glorious blueprint detailing the imaginative hows and urgent whys of maternal creativity. The Mother Artist is a hopeful, luminous answer to the question Can and should a mother still dream? A brilliant and openhearted gift of a book.”
—Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch
“Part art history, part memoir, part cultural critique, Catherine Ricketts’s The Mother Artist is capacious, provocative, and utterly original. It’s a delight to follow the rocket of Ricketts’s gaze from, say, the floorboards in a Rineke Dijkstra photo, to a meditation on the author’s own postpartum experiences, to an analysis of the politics of parental leave. The Mother Artist is enlightening and entertaining and urgent.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Great with Child
“This beautiful landscape of mother artists illuminates the way in which, in spite of the innumerable obstacles and grievances, motherhood has been a fertile ground for creativity. I’m thrilled that this book exists, and I think that every mammal interested in art should read it.”
—Jazmina Barrera, author of Linea Nigra
“A remarkable celebration of women’s creative power. Ricketts demonstrates what we all gain when mothers make, and why we must support them. She masterfully weaves intimate personal stories with gorgeously rendered encounters of art. Her writing is generous, inspiring, hopeful, sensitive to the diversity of motherhood experiences, and downright beautiful. This is exactly the book I need now—a decade into motherhood—and it was the book I desperately needed when I became a mother. I want to buy it for every mother I know! And I encourage every artist to read it—it serves as inspiration for all artists seeking to create in the confines of their lives.”
—Heather Lanier, author of Raising a Rare Girl
“This marvelous book is, all at once, a work of curation, creativity, criticism, and care. Ricketts writes evocatively, as a witness, at the intersection of two creative vocations: motherhood and artmaking. Her vulnerability as a memoirist is deepened by her generous insight as a critic, opening up the work of others. The result is a strong but subtle apologia for why the world needs ‘maternal humanism’ today more than ever. Read this if you’re a mother and an artist, to be sure; but read this, too, if you’re human and hope for a different world.”
—James K. A. Smith, editor in chief, Image journal, and author of You Are What You Love and How to Inhabit Time
“These richly interwoven stories of artists’ lives and the ways in which they have pursued their own paths of creativity through, with, and around the work of care and mothering were often new to me, even though I thought I was familiar with their work. In lucid and engrossing prose, Catherine Ricketts adds her own story to theirs with such clarity, both vulnerable and meaningful in how she shares her interior world. It reminded me of all the books I’ve loved of late—Julie Phillips’s The Baby on the Fire Escape, Sarah Knott’s Mother Is a Verb, and the best of Eula Biss.”
—Michelle Millar Fisher, coauthor of Designing Motherhood and curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
“Reading The Mother Artist felt like being with the best kind of friend: brilliant and honest and deeply invested in your creativity. Its pages are packed with artists who inspire, challenge, and alter the world by being both mothers and artists. Ricketts is right: rather than impeding artmaking, motherhood has something to add to it, something holy and urgent. She asks, How might the art mothers create change a society so marred by brutality? The Mother Artist is a clarion call. The only reason you’ll want to put down Ricketts’s lyrical tour de force is to make more art.”
—Sarah Sentilles, author of Stranger Care
"The Mother Artist is a compelling exploration of motherhood's ability to both limit and stimulate art."
—The Presbyterian Outlook
Marketing Plan
- National and online publicity campaign to women's and parenting media, literary and arts media, news media, and Christian media
- Trade, library, and literary media advertising
- Digital and social-media campaign targeting art-curious women, women artists, literary-nonfiction readers, and those interested in art and art criticism
- Outreach to artist and writer communities, workshops, and retreats for event speaking
- Topical campaign inclusion for Mother's Day and Women's History Month
- Instagram Live conversation series with artists who have children
- Influencer outreach
Available Editions
EDITION | Other Format |
ISBN | 9781506488707 |
PRICE | $28.99 (USD) |
PAGES | 210 |
Links
Available on NetGalley
Featured Reviews
This was a very interesting read. As an artist was interesting to see a connection between women, motherhood, and being an artist.
Thank you to 1517 Media and NetGalley for my free digital copy of this book in exchange for a review.
It is very beautifully written, and explores both the barriers to creation for women artists who become mothers, and the blossoming of creativity in an often different direction for them, stemming from their mothering experiences. Descriptions and musings about Catherine’s own journey through giving birth and mothering punctuate the stories of many others.
This would make a beautiful gift for any woman artist entering into the world of conceiving, carrying and birthing a child, then learning how to raise it alongside their artistic career or hobby. A recommended read, one I prefer to dip into to give time to digest, rather than read in one sitting.
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