Designing Motherhood Is a Spotlight on the Designs That Shape Women's Health

DialPak Contraceptive Dispenser, ca. 2001
Invented by David P. Wagner in 1964
Photo: Erik Gould

Fisher-Price Nursery Monitor, 1983
Photo: Erik Gould

text by Hank Manning

Everyone is born, but the tools that facilitate (or prevent) this process are generally neglected by museums, the very institutions meant to chronicle the human experience. Our male-dominated society has placed more value on the female form—one of the more common sights at most art museums—than the wellbeing of women. Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births, at the Museum of Arts and Design, inverts this to consider how objects, from IUDs to forceps to cradles, have supported, and at times threatened, the wellbeing of mothers and their children. It highlights, furthermore, how disparity of access to these tools has reinforced racial and economic inequality.

The exhibition occupies the museum’s entire fourth floor. Walking clockwise from the elevators around the perimeter, the objects generally follow the timeline of motherhood, from conception to postpartum. Immediately apparent is the sheer multitude of items designed for each stage. 

These inventions have provided some women with the freedom to delay, prevent, or end a pregnancy. A schematic banner shows dozens of patents issued for contraceptives. Older band and ring designs have gradually shrunk and evolved into T-shaped inserts. Tools to procure abortions have also shrunk, from a foot-pump connected to two jars circa 1960 to Mifepristone tablets, in an unassuming white box, today.

Installation view. Photo: Jenna Bascom

Designs for commercial products consider both style and utility. The wooden Tripp Trapp chair features a minimalist form in the shape of an italicized L. The Resus-A-Cradle, created by a midwife, with the appearance of a mummy’s sarcophagus, positions a newborn’s body for easy breathing. Some stroller innovations have sought ease of use, like the six-pound aluminum-framed “Umbrella” stroller, while others, in hot pink and baby blue, sell as eye candy. 

Installation view. Photo: Jenna Bascom

In the center of the exhibition, mannequins adorn clothes for “temporary bodies.” Corsets and girdles, popular from the 15th century onwards, reshaped pregnant women’s bodies to conform to beauty standards without concern for comfort or safety. The Page Boy skirt defied norms, in a society that still considered pregnancy something to hide, upon its 1938 release by allowing wearers to freely adjust for and reveal the curves of their growing waists. Since the 1960s, elastic clothing, like the velvet unitard Bumpsuit, has become popular. Today, pregnant women hold a wide variety of jobs: a US Army maternity uniform, with a camouflage green shirt and pants, looks hardly different from any other military outfit, except for its looser midsection. These outfits, always visible in our peripheral vision, suggest a model of progress for the other sections: designs should make mothers’ lives more comfortable and accessible. 

Deborah Willis
I Made Space for a Good Man, 2009
Lithograph

Photographs evoke mothers’ attitudes towards their rites of passage. Intimate stills show tender love as well as fatigue experienced caring for newborns. In three self-portraits titled I Made Space for a Good Man, Deborah Willis reclaims a spiteful comment that she took up the space of a “good man” by working as a professor while pregnant, declaring that she made space in her body for a “good man,” her son and fellow artist Hank Willis Thomas. 

Birth control pills, cesarean sections, baby formula, and many other innovations have saved countless lives, but access remains unequal. Over time, the universal experience of birth has become less natural and more varied. A National Call for Birth Justice and Accountability, on display, decries that the US suffers the highest rate of maternal death of any developed nation, with women of color disproportionately falling victim at a ratio of nearly 4:1 as compared to white mothers. Relatedly, medical bills reveal that childbirth in the US costs more on average than any other country. Barriers are not only economic but also political. In fourteen languages, green posters featuring the face of the Statue of Liberty describe abortions as “legal, safe, and available.”

By focusing on the designs that shape reproductive health, we recognize them as central to our shared human story.

Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births is on view through March 15 at the Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, New York

Hank Willis Thomas' I AM MANY Implicates Us All in the Making of History

Hank Willis Thomas
Roots (After Bearden), 2023
screenprint and UV print on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond
97.625 × 122 × 3 inches (framed)

text by Hank Manning

Truth is black and white–or is it? In I AM MANY at Jack Shainman Gallery, Hank Willis Thomas invites us to consider how perspective changes our understanding of art, nationhood, oppression, solidarity, and the relationship between the past and present.

In direct reference to the 1,300 identical “I AM A MAN” signs carried during the Black sanitation workers strike of 1968, I AM MANY proposes itself as an antipode to the famed rallying cry. It was this demonstration where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”

As guests enter, the words “LOVE OVER RULES” blink in neon blue. To the left, one black and one white arm stretch towards the heavens, their hands grasped. This marble sculpture is titled Loving Day, in honor of Richard and Mildred Loving, the aptly surnamed couple whose legal battles enshrined the right to interracial marriage in America. 

Hank Willis Thomas
Community, 2024
Polished stainless steel
33.25 × 33.5 × 11.8125 inches

Upstairs, hands continue to feature prominently in the exhibition’s bronze and stainless steel statues. Hands impart the toll of one’s work, reach out for help, link together, call for action, but also violently apprehend. Hands direct actions from the aesthetic–grooming hair–to the existential–resisting or abetting violence.

Hank Willis Thomas
America (gray), 2025
mixed media including decommissioned US prison uniforms
68 x 159 x 1.25 inches

Each piece of Thomas’s visual art demands a second viewing: from a closer distance or a different angle, with more light or more context. Upon first glance, a wall work made partially from decommissioned prison uniforms spells out “AMERICA,” but as we approach, the letters become a dizzying maze. “EVERYTHING” on a lenticular print actually consists of innumerable small “NOTHING”s. Op art prints shift as we walk from left to right, challenging our understanding of the black-white dichotomy. In each of these works, our first impressions are betrayed by unexpected paradoxical interpretations. 

Hank Willis Thomas
Until Ex parte Endo, 2024
UV print on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond, decommissioned US flag
78.5 x 57.5 x 9 inches (framed and assembled)

With written instructions, the exhibition invites us to use a camera flash to uncover the palimpsestic nature of the work, revealing images that are often lost to history. Under an American flag and an old portrait of the US Capitol building, light reveals children of varied races pledging allegiance. Numerous faces of protestors, those who came together to fight and build our current world, appear etched into UV-printed retroreflective vinyl. In the final room upstairs, prints of the pamphlet “Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot” hang. When illuminated, they unveil photographs of protesters, armed police, and smashed windows. One multiple mixed-media quilt is described as “reminiscent of a QR code,” emblematic of the way that the incarcerated are treated like “faceless numbers on a spreadsheet.” 

The late King’s presence and guidance are felt throughout the exhibition. But it is not his face hidden within the works. Rather, we see the thousands of people who listened to him declare, “I Have a Dream” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Thomas forces us to reconsider not just how we understand our world today, but how we read history, from the slave trade to the Civil Rights movement to our present day. It is the story of not just a man, or any person, but many. The exhibition’s continuous and multifaceted interactivity nudges us: we too are part of the story and must move, shed light, think critically, and use our voices. 


Hank Willis Thomas: I AM MANY is on view until November 1 at Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, New York