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

The Perfect Specimen: Read Our Interview of Lauren Lee McCarthy On Her Exhibition "Bodily Autonomy" @ Mandeville Art Gallery In San Diego →

medical pamphlet with man spitting into a vial says "So You've Decided to Exchange Saliva"

Installation view, Lauren Lee McCarthy: Bodily Autonomy at UC San Diego Mandeville Art Gallery. March 2-May 25, 2024. Photo by Pablo Mason. With support from Creative Capital.

When asked to read through a long list of terms and conditions before giving consent, most of us have developed a reflexive response of scrolling to the bottom and trudging ahead. There’s a miniature risk/benefit analysis that we all conduct, which includes a completely unknown potential risk in the distant future, and the near future benefit of moving on. Time is such a valuable commodity that we regularly find ourselves sharing everything from personal data, browsing data, biometric data, and more. Oftentimes, there’s no contract at all. You may have thought you were showing all of your friends how your looks changed from 2009 to 2019, but you were really training someone’s private surveillance software. The list of myopic, nefarious applications that we serve by giving ourselves away to faceless data farms in exchange for what often amounts to a forgettable laugh is endless. In Lauren Lee McCarthy’s Bodily Autonomy exhibition at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Art Gallery, she explores two very specific aspects of the way that we engage with science and technology. With “Surrogate,” she created an application where couples and individuals who are interested in hiring her as a surrogate mother are invited to dictate everything from her eating and sleeping habits, to her daily activities, and more. While these requests are not actually fulfilled, the application itself challenges notions of reproduction, genetic selection, and commerce. With “Saliva” she has created a saliva exchange station that is activated every Thursday from 6-8pm where visitors are invited to give and receive samples of their own saliva. Each participant is given agency to label their sample as they prefer and they provide the conditions for what happens to it (scout’s honor). Doreen A. Ríos, a PhD candidate in Art History, Theory, and Criticism at UC San Diego and an independent curator and researcher, spoke with McCarthy to discuss the implications of these technologies and the imperative within the work to embody a more transparent form of participation. Read more.

Gagosian Presents MAN RAY "The Mysteries of Château du Dé" in San Francisco

During his storied career, Man Ray, a multidisciplinary artist with a rare breadth, worked in a variety of mediums, including painting, photography, sculpture, printmaking, film, poetry, and prose. While for him photography and painting were paramount, his work in early film and cinema is often overlooked.

Man Ray’s first experience in making film was in New York, in 1920, when he worked with Marcel Duchamp on an unsuccessful attempt to create a three-dimensional film. After moving to Paris, in 1921, his diverse experimentation in the medium of photography eventually led him back to the moving image.

the exhibition also includes objects, drawings, and photography. Moving fluidly between media, Man Ray often made several iterations of a work—photographing it, assembling and disassembling, or making multiples—reproduction being crucial to his concept of the art object. Throughout his vast body of work, Man Ray alluded to relationships between the real and the fictive, the literal and the imaginative, with a deft mastery over the liminal territory between the abstract and the figurative form.

The Mysteries of Château du Dé will be on view throughout February 29, 2020 at Gagosian 657 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Josh Smith: Emo Jungle @ David Zwirner New York

Josh Smith’s “Emo Jungle” exhibition, featuring the artist’s latest works, is now on view at David Zwirner in New York. Smith has developed a prolific and expansive body of painting that employs visual motifs as a means of exploring the potentiality of the painted surface. Each painting serves as a stage in an ongoing, heterogeneous process of image production and experimentation, in which visuals and colors are recycled and refined. Smith’s series of grim reapers, devils, turtles, and tropical landscapes are rendered in lush ribbons and fields of color, leaving the viewer a dazzling display of reimagination.

“Emo Jungle” is on view through July 19 at David Zwirner 525 W 19th St, New York. photographs courtesy of David Zwirner.