In 2008, I gave birth at home, in the bed I still sleep in today, to my second child; and instead of marveling at their vernix-covered scalp and the fact of their being born in the caul during a full moon, I had an extended anxiety attack, convinced I wasn’t a good enough feminist to be a good mother to this baby who I thought at the time was a girl. This led to a reckoning — in order to love and parent my children, I had to love and accept myself — and forced a shift in my art practice toward short bursts of feminist performance that I could accomplish after bedtime.It’s with this and many other experiences in mind that I approached Jordan Troeller’s new book Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury (2025), which looks at the community of Bay Area women modernists around Asawa in the 1950s and ’60s, including Merry Renk, Beth Van Hoesen, Sally Byrne Woodbridge, and Imogen Cunningham. Asawa and her circle didn’t make work about motherhood; they made work while mothering. Troeller argues that by using the rhythms of the domestic as organizing principles and forging an interdependent care and creative community, and in spite of ideas of the modern male genius alone in his studio, these women modernists “made motherhood into a medium.” Sharon Litzky and students working on the Alvarado mosaic mural at Alvarado Elementary School in San Francisco in 1970, part of a pedagogical program founded by Asawa and Woodbridge (photo by Michael Dixon, image courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.)I’m not sure about motherhood as a medium in and of itself — it’s certainly an art — perhaps best understood as endurance art. Nonetheless, I loved reading about Asawa’s art practice while she raised six children and made work not in a standalone studio but in the house where they lived together. Troeller shows us the lives and practices of artist-mothers who nurtured children, creativity, and communities simultaneously. She organizes the book into three parts: “Household Objects,” “Metaphors of (Pro)creation,” and “Caretaking in Public.” The first usefully delves into the artists’ chosen materials, such as paper and wire, that had no fumes, and were thus not dangerous to children and compatible with nurture work. Troeller writes that Asawa “was someone in constant dialogue with fragility, dependence, and vulnerability.” Interruption and responsiveness are not just conditions of childcare and time and space, Asawa affirmed, but of creativity and generativity. The skills of keeping a human alive are inherently artistic.Choreographer and dance instructor June Lane Christensen and her students with Ruth Asawa’s sculpture “Untitled S.437” (1956) in Santa Barbara in 1956 (artwork © 2025 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc. / Artist Rights Society, NY, courtesy David Zwirner; image courtesy Katherine Collis)Imogen Cunningham, a photographer who was many years Asawa’s senior, is a major focus in the book’s second section. In one arresting spread, we see her portrait of Gertrude Stein from 1935 across from her similarly posed portrait of Ruth Asawa from 1975 — both “portrayed as titans, imposing figures at the height of their powers,” Troeller writes. Troeller also beautifully connects the technique of repetition in their work; Asawa’s rows and rows of looped metal echo Stein’s “a rose is a rose is a rose.” Asawa’s belief that “you can only learn by doing” guides the third section, which focuses on arts education and art making as community care. She wanted an artist in every public school and spent a decade working on a pedagogical experiment called the Alvarado School Arts Workshop (now the San Francisco Arts Education Project). I appreciated the amount of space Troeller spends on “baker’s clay” — the flour, salt, and water concoction that hundreds of students used to make self-portraits, and that Asawa used to model what would become her Hyatt Fountain. In this way, the author gets to the heart of something extraordinary: “motherhood not as a biographical horizon but as a relationship to artistic materials, a feature of artistic self-fashioning, and a condition of reception.” My hours on the kitchen floor making slime are part of my aesthetic; I know this, yet I still love to see it reflected back at me.Children working on the Stitchery Mural at Hillcrest Elementary School, led by Nancy Thompson and Ruth Asawa as part of the Alvarado School Arts Workshop, in 1974 (image courtesy Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc.)Like Hettie Judah and other authors in recent years, Troeller uses the term “artist-mother” rather than “mother-artist,” and shows us how reciprocity and caretaking become the work itself, not just the subject or the conditions. For art and children to survive and sometimes thrive, I depended on multiple sticky web systems: a child care co-op in Williamsburg (where we’d sometimes breastfed each other’s babies) and another one later in Jackson Heights, a shared garden with shared childcare responsibilities, an Upstate commune for three weeks every summer, a few years of collaborative performance work with No Wave Performance Task Force, curator-mothers who understood the work, two residencies at the Museum of Motherhood in St. Petersburg, and dozens of art moms near and far to commiserate with and challenge and hold and love. Troeller has crafted a lucid and ludic portrait not of a singular artist, but of an artist among other artists. This deeply researched and insightful book models non-patriarchal forms of both making art and narrating its history, reminding us that taking care of children and making art — be it public art, community work, with children, or for children — are radical acts of parenting and anti-totalitarian making.Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury (2025) by Jordan Troeller is published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press and is available online and through independent booksellers.