Mothering Myths: An ABC of Art, Birth and Care (Pre-order)

Published to accompany the group exhibition Good Mom/Bad Mom: Unraveling the Mother Myth at Centraal Museum, Utrecht (NL) on view 29 March –14 September 2025. This book will have the form of an abecedarium, edited by Laurie Cluitmans, designed by Bart de Baets, and published by Valiz.

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.