Book Launch: Mother Art Prize

To celebrate the 4th edition of the Mother Art Prize publication (available to pre-order now) and the upcoming 10th anniversary of Procreate Project, founder Dyana Gravina is joined by art historian and writer Catherine McCormack to discuss the themes and experiences explored in the book. All participants are invited to join the conversation, and outcomes will be integrated into the final edits of the Mother Art Prize book.

The conversation is structured around a number of key ideas to explore:

Intergenerational silences and the ways in which we re-imagine past and future collective practices. Feminist art history created a space for the complex identity of the mother artist, as well as for work about maternal experience over half a century ago, and yet it often feels as if these conversations are beginning as if for the first time, and without the embedded foundations of that legacy on which to build.

How patriarchal capitalistic development, linked with the emergence of the nuclear family, still impacts the way we perceive care-work and informs current systems and movements, even those with a ‘feminist’ inspiration.

The queering potential of the Mother* and the maternal experience with an expanded view. Everything is present and happening in the mother's experience to interrupt and defy those capitalistic structures that we are railing against and critiquing in a wider context.

From different perspectives, Dyana and Catherine, and all present, can explore a last question: 'How do we go beyond the limiting discussion of ‘books or babies’ or creation/ procreation?’. This is an invitation open to all, to invite a plurality of experiences of the ones present, in person and on Instagram, to co-create an incubator that allows the capacity to expand collective resistance and coordinate strategies in intersectional groups.

The Mother Art Prize book is available to pre-order here.