New Maternalisms (2012-2018)
New Maternalisms: REDUX
Department of Art & Design
Curated by Natalie Loveless
Artists: Lenka Clayton, Jess Dobkin, Alejandra Herrera, Courtney Kessel, & Jill Miller.
Exhibition: May 12 - June 4, 2016
Opening Reception & Evening of Live Performance: May 12, 2016, 6:00 pm—9pm
FAB Gallery, University of Alberta
New Maternalisms Redux is the third and last in the New Maternalisms exhibition series (following Toronto 2012 and Santiago 2014). It features five performance and project-based artists drawn from the first two exhibitions: Lenka Clayton, Jess Dobkin, Alejandra Herrera, Courtney Kessel, & Jill Miller. The work of these artists represents a spectrum of experience; it includes queer and straight identified mothers, single and partnered mothers, mothers of differently abled children, mothers of twins and singletons, and a range of race/class/economic privilege. Together they investigate the maternal as an important political and affective force.
Forty years after the intervention of feminist art, what is the experience of the daughters of that era who have become mothers? What are the discursive and material differences between early maternal artworks of the 1970s and those being produced in the first two decades of the 21st century? Responding to these questions, New Maternalisms revisits debates central to 70s feminist art & theory in the context of political & activist art today. The project, conceived by artist and academic Natalie S. Loveless in 2010, consists of three curated exhibitions with satellite events and catalogues, New Maternalisms (2012), New Maternalisms Chile (2014), New Maternalisms Redux (2016), and an international colloquium event, Mapping the Maternal: Art, Ethics, and the Anthropocene (2016).
