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

Read Our Review Of Kim-Anh Schreiber's New Book Fantasy

text by Summer Bowie

When planning a pregnancy or discussing the process of birth, we often hear about the rebirth that the mother experiences—her renaissance as woman with child, giver of life, and newborn unto herself. It’s such a beautiful image when you ignore the suicide that was planned for the woman who once was. Thus is the balance of life and death, and it's one that some of us contend with more readily than others. Nothing is more apparent than this in Kim-Anh Schreiber’s Fantasy, wherein the book’s titular figure is the daughter of a mother who never stops mourning the life she should have had; her inescapable Karma. 

This cross-genre novel is a disembodied lung desperately inflating and deflating itself with stale cigarette smoke and the decades-old dust of whatever room you’re sitting in. It’s a work of autofiction that is equally exposed and pregnable as it is a fictitious hallucination woven like a cosmic braid with scenes from Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 film, House. The intergenerational sorority of aunts, mother, and grandmother that represent the author’s Vietnamese refugee matrilineage become interchangeable with Obayashi’s highly Westernized depiction of archetypal Japanese schoolgirls and the dubious matriarchs who haunt them. The spaces within the house hold formative and traumatic memories alike. They contain cultures of sexually repressed, sisterly perversions that are devoid of sexuality, yet brimming with desire. Schreiber is wont to illustrate scenes in much the same way as Obayashi—little comedic horrors that drip with Agent Orange and irradiated uranium (respectively) over postwar rubble both seen and unseen. House makes a perfect companion for this book in the way that it depicts the domicile as a metaphor for the body. A cell that contains the bodies of all the women who have kept it.

In Fantasy, mother tongue is laced with the mysterious motherland in a braid that spans the Pacific Ocean. A language spoken between grandmother and granddaughter flourishes and fades in this boat they call home, its orbit so wide one forgets that it’s indeed moving. Only her mother’s constant motion is detected as she skirts in and out on an outlet designer dingy, leaving an inexplicably large wake each time on her way out. You can trace the roots of words that have died in the wisps that fly out of one loop or the next, having provided the foundation of their intercontinental bridge, they take an unceremonious bow and quietly escape the lexicon of their nomadic identity. “Ever since I was a little girl, I have lived in a fantastic theatron: a seeing place whose walls keep disappearing, transforming to mask, fly, tease, or torment, and beyond the walls are nothingness, and three generations of women live with me, entering through the door to rehearse their magical future, every character brought down by their character, by the desire to look good as themselves for themselves, and I alone see them, I alone beholding my house, my body, my ghosts and my gods, and my screen that is suddenly a cannibal.”

Am I really so porous that someone could just bleed into me? asks Khaos, a recurring figure whose only identifying characteristics are Daughter Flower, pregnant. Flowers constitute the form of certain characters at times, nourish them at others, and press their withering bodies into the pages of a history book from a forgotten land. Having meticulously studied a smorgasbord of allegories that portray women stuck in houses such as Mekong Hotel, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Pretty Little Liars, The Virgin Suicides, and so on, Schreiber takes an incisive look at the corporal quality of our deepest psychic understandings and the umbilical cord that carries our identity from one body to the next. She is indefatiguably distinguishing one X from the other in her chromosomal set, knowing that there isn’t a corpus callosum dividing her dual identities, but rather an extensive sequence of yins and yangs swirling; an infinite loop of chain-smoking daisies propelling the turbine of life and death. Like the avatars of an ancient goddess, they circulate the dust that gathers in the corners of the epigenetic house, floating ubiquitously through the air, carrying traces of every dead and living thing that ever graced it with their presence.

Fantasy features cover art by Sojourner Truth Parsons and is published by Sidebrow Books. Click here to preorder. Follow Kim-Anh Schreiber on Instagram.

Read Claressinka Anderson Pugliese's Poetic Response to Fay Ray's "I Am The House" @ Shulamit Nazarian →

I AM THE HOUSE continues Ray’s interest in the fetishization of objects and the construction of female identity through high-contrast, monochromatic photomontages and suspended metallic sculptures. Throughout this series, she situates the body as a vessel, one that carries life, physical memories, and emotional fortitude. Read Claressinka Anderson Pugliese's poetic response here. See additional photographs from the exhibition here. photograph by Lani Trock

Exclusive Premiere of "Screen Test n.11: Romantic Love" by Alex Franco Featuring Poet and Model Greta Bellamacina

The short-film and intimate spoken word snapshot, entitled Screen Test n.11: Romantic Love, by photographer and filmmaker Alex Franco, features English poet and model Greta Bellamacina sprawled out, reading her poem Romantic Love. Bellamacina, who just had her first child with fellow artist and poet Robert Montgomery, says that the poem is from a series that explores the “early stages of motherhood from a young female contemporary perspective,” which is a perspective that is “massively under represented in the media today.” The poem, Romantic Love, is inspired by Lucien Freud’s 2002 painting Naked Portrait, which features a pregnant Kate Moss softly laying her head on her own arm in an intimate setting with a maternal glow. Bellamacina, who is a lingual portraitist that uses deeply powerful rhythms of language to paint her poems, plans to release a book of poetry later this month called Stockholm Syndrome. Click here to read the poem. Poem by Greta Bellamacina @ VIVA Model Management. Film by Alex Franco @ Artist and Agency .