Drawing on a range of feminisms, it challenges familiar archetypes of motherhood, construing motherhood as a multivalent term. The artists in Picturing Motherhood Now use motherhood as a lens through which to examine contemporary social issues—the changing definitions of family and gender, the histories and afterlives of slavery, the legacies of migration, and the preservation of matrilineal Indigenous cultures.

Picturing Motherhood Now focuses on art made in the past two decades, while integrating work by significant pioneers to narrate an intergenerational and evolving story of motherhood.

Major support is provided in memory of Myrlin von Glahn. Additional support is provided by Cathy Lincoln. Generous support is provided by the Cleveland Society for Contemporary Art, and Joanne Cohen and Morris Wheeler.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.

All exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art are underwritten by the CMA Fund for Exhibitions. Generous annual support is provided by Mr. and Mrs. Walter R. Chapman Jr., the Jeffery Wallace Ellis Trust in memory of Lloyd H. Ellis Jr., Janice Hammond, and Edward Hemmelgarn, Eva and Rudolf Linnebach, William S. and Margaret F. Lipscomb, Tim O’Brien, and Breck Platner, Anne H. Weil, and the Women’s Council of the Cleveland Museum of Art.