2024 DOLLAR BANK THREE RIVERS ARTS FESTIVAL | MAY 31-JUNE 9, 2024
ANTHROPOLOGY OF MOTHERHOOD:
KINSHIP & OTHERMOTHERING
BYHAM THEATER | 101 6th ST, PITTSBURGH, PA 15222
a functional art installation curated by Fran Flaherty, co-curated by Amy Bowman-McElhone
Image Description: A banner of nine square details of art from the exhibition. From left to right: Black and white photograph of a person looking out through the latticework of their hands. Golden brown braided center of a challah bread loaf. Four expressive hands each cutting into a beautifully textured cake, as sunlight streams into the atmospheric setting. Strings of differently sized pearls with tints ranging from sea green to gray and gold. Painting of a mother with long black hair and a bright pink shirt who’s grooming her child’s hair as the child looks toward us, relaxing for a moment in her lap. Differently colored monstera-shaped leaves in yellows, blues, and pinks draped over the green bottom of a dress. Black and white photograph of bald-headed person with lean arms outsretched in crouched position, whites of eyes exposed, and tongue gaping down reminiscent of a Kali-Ma pose. Double-exposure video still view of person in bathtub leaning back as the hands of someone behind them rubs the crown of their head. High contrast teal blue head covering surrounding the face of a person looking out with yellow thin text on top that is starting to read, “What has been, what will be, and…”
ARTISTS
Trisheena Bolakale
Anna Brody
Liesel Burisch
Mary Carroll
Katie Cercone
Veronica Corpuz
laura dudu
Patti Durr
Rajen Gurung
Jen Haefeli
Himalayan Foundation-USA
Home Affairs Collective
Noëlle King
Fai Knudson
Rose Malenfant
Tyler and Ashoka Phan
Milo Meldrum
Aimbee Rai
Ram Rai
Sarah Shotland
Sarah Simmons
Olivia Devorah Tucker
huiyin zhou 徽音
Anthropology of Motherhood (AoM) is celebrating its ninth year with the Dollar Bank Three Rivers Arts Festival. AoM is an exhibition featuring works of art that engage in the complex visual, material, emotional, corporeal, and lived experiences of motherhood, caregiving, parenting, nurturing, and maternal labor. This unique hybrid exhibition is innovatively designed as both an art space, an interactive amenity, and a place of respite for families with young children.
This year, AoM explores the diverse interpretations and contemporary expressions of kinship - the bonds that connect us, whether by blood, friendship, community, or shared experience – as models of solidarity, activism, and resistance that have the potential to generate robust infrastructures of care.
Within maternal feminist discourses, kinship is often defined and understood through the lens of the care paradigm, caregiving, nurturing relationships, and values of the maternal. The AOM project is grounded in a maternal feminist lens that emphasizes the value of maternal roles and qualities, carework and complex networks of nurturing relationality in both private and public spheres.
In addressing the complexity and fluidity of kinship, we look to black feminist scholars such as Patricia Hill Collins, who coined the terms “Othermothering” and “Community Mothering,” which, according to Kaila Adia, “has been defined as a form of mothering that is rooted in political activism and within a Black Feminist paradigm. It is the concept of accepting responsibility for a child that is not one’s own in an arrangement that may or may not be formal. Although motherhood is a contradictory institution experienced in diverse ways by different women.”
For this exhibition, we look to Queer kinship, which refers to the ways in which the LGBTQIA2S+ community forms familial and close relational bonds that may or may not conform to patriarchal notions of family and kinship. Queer kinship articulates the ways in which queer-identifying people create and sustain meaningful relationships in the context of broader societal structures that privilege heteronormative family models, such as through “chosen families.”
We also center indigenous concepts of kinship, which differ widely among various cultures around the world, but often share certain characteristics that distinguish them from Western notions of kinship such as: extended family structure, non-biological ties, clan and totem systems, and a connection to land and ancestors.
