Featuring Michelle Millar Fisher, Amber Winick, Tekara Gainey & Carmen Winant
(October 21, 2021)
Join us for a conversation on Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births with co-authors Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick and featured exhibiting artist Carmen Winant for the launch of their book from MIT Press.
A book, exhibition, curriculum, and series of public programs, Designing Motherhood is a wide-ranging, first-of-its-kind consideration of the arc of human reproduction through the lens of design by curators, artists, and theorists. The project explores more than eighty designs—iconic, conceptual, archaic, titillating, emotionally charged, or just plain strange—that have defined the relationships between people and babies over the past century. TUAG is thrilled to host this Boston-area event to celebrate the publication in conjunction with the exhibition Staying with the Trouble, a long view into feminist art practices from the 1970s to today.
“The provocative new book and exhibition series, Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births, makes the case that there is a whole world of objects pertaining to women, mothers and pregnant people that have been overlooked from the perspective of form and function, and unstudied in terms of how their designs came to be.”–New York Times Arts
Michelle Millar Fisher is a curator and an architecture and design historian. She received an MA and an M.Phil in Art History from the University of Glasgow, as well as an M.Phil from The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY), where she is completing her doctorate in art history. She is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, design, and craft.
Amber Winick is a design historian and writer based in New York’s Hudson Valley. She is the recipient of two Fulbright Awards and has lived and researched design around the world. Amber holds an MA in Design History, Decorative Arts, and Material Culture from the Bard Graduate Center, and a BA in anthropology and child development from Sarah Lawrence College. In addition to her work as a writer and consultant, she holds regular study groups around child development and respectful caregiving. Amber’s daughters also serve as research subjects for their design-loving, better-birth-and-postpartum-championing, slow-childhood-advocating mother.
Tekara Gainey is a reproductive justice advocate and birth worker. She fuses her master’s in anthropology with her reproductive work to acknowledge and address the systems of oppression that impact access to compassionate, nonjudgmental reproductive care for birthing persons and their families across the spectrum of their needs. Tekara is a birth doula and childbirth educator, and now serves as the program associate for Maternity Care Coalition’s community doula and breastfeeding programs.
Carmen Winant is a writer and visual artist who explores representations of women through collage, mixed media, and installation. She is the Roy Lichtenstein Chair of Studio Art at Ohio State University. Her work is featured in Designing Motherhood and TUAG’s fall exhibition Staying with the Trouble.
