Coming in May!

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. In Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury, Jordan Troeller analyzes this remarkable moment. 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.

Delving into the archive, where the traces of motherhood have not yet been erased from official history, Troeller reveals Ruth Asawa’s personal and professional dialogue with several other artist-mothers, including Merry Renk, Imogen Cunningham, and Sally Woodbridge.

Hardcover, 368 pages, 2025.

8.3 x 10.3 in.