In 2008, I gave birth at home, in the bed I still sleep in today, to my second child; and instead of marveling at their vernix-covered scalp and the fact of their being born in the caul during a full moon, I had an extended anxiety attack, convinced I wasn\u2019t a good enough feminist to be a good mother to this baby who I thought at the time was a girl. This led to a reckoning \u2014 in order to love and parent my children, I had to love and accept myself \u2014 and forced a shift in my art practice toward short bursts of feminist performance that I could accomplish after bedtime.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s with this and many other experiences in mind that I approached Jordan Troeller\u2019s new book Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury (2025), which looks at the community of Bay Area women modernists around Asawa in the 1950s and \u201960s, including Merry Renk, Beth Van Hoesen, Sally Byrne Woodbridge, and Imogen Cunningham. Asawa and her circle didn\u2019t make work about motherhood; they made work while mothering. Troeller argues that by using the rhythms of the domestic as organizing principles and forging an interdependent care and creative community, and in spite of ideas of the modern male genius alone in his studio, these women modernists \u201cmade motherhood into a medium.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Sharon Litzky and students working on the Alvarado mosaic mural at Alvarado Elementary School in San Francisco in 1970, part of a pedagogical program founded by Asawa and Woodbridge (photo by Michael Dixon, image courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.)<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not sure about motherhood as a medium in and of itself \u2014 it\u2019s certainly an art \u2014 perhaps best understood as endurance art. Nonetheless, I loved reading about Asawa\u2019s art practice while she raised six children and made work not in a standalone studio but in the house where they lived together. Troeller shows us the lives and practices of artist-mothers who nurtured children, creativity, and communities simultaneously.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She organizes the book into three parts: \u201cHousehold Objects,\u201d \u201cMetaphors of (Pro)creation,\u201d and \u201cCaretaking in Public.\u201d The first usefully delves into the artists\u2019 chosen materials, such as paper and wire, that had no fumes, and were thus not dangerous to children and compatible with nurture work. Troeller writes that Asawa \u201cwas someone in constant dialogue with fragility, dependence, and vulnerability.\u201d Interruption and responsiveness are not just conditions of childcare and time and space, Asawa affirmed, but of creativity and generativity. The skills of keeping a human alive are inherently artistic.<\/p>\n
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Choreographer and dance instructor June Lane Christensen and her students with Ruth Asawa\u2019s sculpture \u201cUntitled S.437\u201d (1956) in Santa Barbara in 1956\u00a0(artwork \u00a9 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. \/ Artist Rights Society, NY, courtesy David Zwirner; image courtesy Katherine Collis)<\/p>\n
Imogen Cunningham, a photographer who was many years Asawa\u2019s senior, is a major focus in the book\u2019s second section. In one arresting spread, we see her portrait of Gertrude Stein from 1935 across from her similarly posed portrait of Ruth Asawa from 1975 \u2014 both \u201cportrayed as titans, imposing figures at the height of their powers,\u201d Troeller writes. Troeller also beautifully connects the technique of repetition in their work; Asawa\u2019s rows and rows of looped metal echo Stein\u2019s \u201ca rose is a rose is a rose<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Asawa\u2019s belief that \u201cyou can only learn by doing\u201d guides the third section, which focuses on arts education and art making as community care. She wanted an artist in every public school and spent a decade working on a pedagogical experiment called the Alvarado School Arts Workshop (now the San Francisco Arts Education Project<\/a>). I appreciated the amount of space Troeller spends on \u201cbaker\u2019s clay\u201d \u2014 the flour, salt, and water concoction that hundreds of students used to make self-portraits, and that Asawa used to model what would become her Hyatt Fountain<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n In this way, the author gets to the heart of something extraordinary: \u201cmotherhood not as a biographical horizon but as a relationship to artistic materials, a feature of artistic self-fashioning, and a condition of reception.\u201d My hours on the kitchen floor making slime are part of my aesthetic; I know this, yet I still love to see it reflected back at me.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/alvarado-school-arts-workshop-1200x813.jpg\")
Children working on the Stitchery Mural at Hillcrest Elementary School, led by Nancy Thompson and Ruth Asawa as part of the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, in 1974 (image courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.)<\/p>\n