Mothering Myths
An ABC of Art, Birth and Care

- Forthcoming: expected end of March 2025. You can pre-order this book in our webshop. As soon as the book is available, we will dispatch your order.
- This book will have the form of an abecedarium. In its form and through its collaborators it is a sequel to On the Necessity of Gardening, which was also edited by Laurie Cluitmans, designed by Bart de Baets, and published by Valiz.
- Transhistorical and intersectional perspectives on motherhood and/in the arts.
Editors/authors: Laurie Cluitmans & Heske ten Cate
Contributors: Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Rosemarie Buikema, Trudy Dehue, Babs Gons, Camille Henrot, Sheila Heti, bell hooks, Julie Phillips, Sylvia Plath, Lisa Smit, Lily van der Stokker, Ocean Vuong, and many others. More than 160 lemmas/texts
Design: Bart de Baets, www.bartdebaets.nl
Partners: Centraal Museum Utrecht (Exhibition: ‘Good Mom/Bad Mom: Unraveling the Mother Myth’, 28 March–14 Sept. 2025) Nest, The Hague (Exhibition: ‘Still Parent’, Sept. 2025–onwards)
Support: Mondriaan Fund, Cultuurfonds, HORIZON EU/RE-WIRING, MOED
Forthcoming: March 2025, Valiz | pb | c. 300 pp. | 32 x 24 cm (h x w) | English | ISBN 978-94-93246-42-3 | €32,50
Motherhood is a theme that touches upon the core of life, but has nevertheless been kept in the private sphere, haunted by clichés, stigmas and myths for a long time. Motherhood has always been seen as trivial, not as a subject for real art. At the same time, artists with a womb faced the cliché that they had to decide between making art or having a child, as they both would take up all the time and energy of the mother.
Mothering Myths unravels these clichés, stigmas and myths, through the lens of art, and a transhistorical and intersectional perspective, at the same time being very playful and open to many interpretations. It breaks the perspective of the individual mother-figure and makes space for collectivity, different forms of ‘mothering’ and political questions around self-determination. Mothering Myths presents the emancipatory nature of the artist- mother, the voluntarily childless woman, the non-female mother and the raven mother, through concepts as kinship, revolutionary parenting, womb consciousness and reproductive justice.