‘Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury’ relates how a group of artist-mothers in postwar San Francisco refused the centuries-old belief that a woman could not make art while also raising children.
For most of modern history, to be an artist and a mother was to embody a contradiction in terms. This “awful dichotomy,” as painter Alice Neel put it, pitted artmaking against caretaking and argued that the best art was made at the expense of family and futurity. But in San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, a group of artists gathered around Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) began to reject this dominant narrative. Insisting that their labor as mothers fueled their labor as artists, these women redefined key aesthetic concerns of their era, including autonomy, medium specificity, and originality.
In Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury, Jordan Troeller analyses this remarkable moment. Troeller reveals Ruth Asawa’s personal and professional dialogue with several other artist-mothers, including Merry Renk, Imogen Cunningham, and Sally Woodbridge. The book explores their work, life and vision in three broad areas: domesticity and decoration; metaphors for creativity; and maternal labor in the public sphere, especially in the public schools.
Jordan Troeller, The MIT Press, 2025, 368 pages, ills. colour & bw, hardcover, English
