Museum Representations of Motherhood and the Maternal is the first book to address the underrepresentation of motherhood in museums. Questioning how mothering and maternal experiences should be represented in museums, Louise-Clarke argues that such institutions wield the power to influence what we think about families, mothers and the labour of care. Using the term ‘mothering’ to encompass lived experiences of mothering or caring that are not exclusively tied to sex, gender, or the maternal body, Louise-Clarke explores the ways that experiences of mothering can be represented in museums. The book begins this exploration with Australia’s Museums Victoria (MV), then expands to look at international cases. Offering a blueprint for what Louise-Clarke calls a ‘museology of mothering’, the book imagines what a museum that articulates maternal subjectivities might look and sound like. Museum Representations of Motherhood and the Maternal initiates a dialogue between museum studies and maternal studies, making it essential reading for scholars and students working in both disciplines. Questioning conventional museum practices and the values that underpin them, the book will also be of interest to museum and heritage practitioners around the world.

Explores the maternal experience from the mother's point of view. The book questions a society that has devalued and sentimentalized motherhood, and presents images of generative and creative women who are also mothers. It also discusses the portrayal of mothers in art, film and literature.

Feminist motherhood is a surprisingly unexplored subject. In fact, feminism and motherhood have been often thought of as incompatible. Profound, provocative, and innovative, Feminist Art and the Maternal is the first work to critically examine the dilemmas and promises of representing feminist motherhood in contemporary art and visual culture. Andrea Liss skillfully incorporates theory with passionate personal reflections on the maternal, and in doing so she advances a fresh and necessary perspective on both feminism and art.

Volume One: This volume catalogues the distinguished and comprehensive collection of approximately 400 works of American sculpture by artists born before 1865. This publication includes an introduction on the history of the collection's formation, particularly in the context of the Museum's early years of acquisitions, and discusses the outstanding personalities involved. --Metropolitan Museum of Art website.

Presents a collection over two hundred artworks from the ancient world up to the present which are paired with quotations from a diversity of writers celebrating mothers and motherhood.

In the mid-1980s, after the Indochina Wars, a shortage of men meant that many single women in Vietnam found themselves without suitable marital prospects. A number of these women chose to pursue single motherhood by “asking for a child” (xin con)—asking men to get them pregnant out of wedlock. Xin con appeared to be a radical departure from traditional Vietnamese kinship values and practices, which were based in Confucian patriarchal and patrilineal reproductive interests. However, this innovative solution was rooted in both pre- and postwar values, practices, and notions of gender, kinship, love, and sexuality. This ethnography explores the practice of xin con among single mothers in the postwar era and today, and considers the ways their reproductive agency was embraced rather than rejected by the Vietnamese state as it entered the global market economy. Rather than condemning or trying to restrict older single women’s reproductive agency, government officials enacted policies that would accommodate both the women and the state—a strategy that represents an intriguing alignment of Confucian heritage, Communist ideology, and governing tactics and demonstrates the social power of women.

Reconciling Art and Mothering contributes a chorus of new voices to the burgeoning body of scholarship on art and the maternal and, for the first time, focuses exclusively on maternal representations and experiences within visual art throughout the world. This innovative essay collection joins the voices of practicing artists with those of art historians, acknowledging the fluidity of those categories. The twenty-five essays of Reconciling Art and Mothering are grouped into two sections, the first written by art historians and the second by artists. Art historians reflect on the work of artists addressing motherhood-including Marguerite G?rd, Chana Orloff, and Ren?Cox-from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Contributions by contemporary artist-mothers, such as Gail Rebhan, Denise Ferris, and Myrel Chernick, point to the influence of past generations of artist-mothers, to the inspiration found in the work of maternally minded literary and cultural theorists, and to attempts to broaden definitions of maternity. Working against a hegemonic construction of motherhood, the contributors discuss complex and diverse feminist mothering experiences, from maternal ambivalence to queer mothering to quests for self-fulfillment. The essays address mothering experiences around the globe, with contributors hailing from North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia.