Tara McDowell’s The Mother Artist will examine mothering as an emergent subject and condition of contemporary art. Proposing an expanded conception of motherhood in artistic practice, the book will move from the bodily and psychic transformations of becoming a mother, to collective mothering in solidarity with non-biological mothering, to reproductive and domestic labor, and to queer mothering and Indigenous matriarchies.
Tara McDowell is a curator and associate professor and director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University. She is the author of The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess (MIT Press, 2019). Her writing has appeared in Artforum, Artlink, Discipline, e-flux Criticism, Filip, The Lifted Brow, Memo, Miami Rail, Mousse, un Magazine, and The Exhibitionist.