Mother(ings): From the Home to the Planet. A Dialogue between Mother Art Collective and Elena Cologni

Mother Art Collective (MAC) have been ‘practicing’ care through their pioneering art within the feminist art scene formed in the 70s at the Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, and their alternative education project the Feminist Studio Workshop, centrered around lived experience and informed by theories and ideas from the first and second waves feminism. MAC’s controversial public-funded early artworks this account will refer to specifically, were crucial to advance the debate on the invisibility of those who were artist and mothers. Elena Cologni relates to their work with a ‘caring-with’ approach, and argues that not only it anticipated the then not yet formed philosophical/psychological context of care ethics (Gilligan 1982), including a new understanding of care practices, motherhood and ‘care as labour’ (Ruddick 89), but that it also contributes to a feminist care aesthetics through ‘practicing mothering’ as a social and political act.