A Museum Full of Mothers, Not Just on Mother’s Day

The Brooklyn Museum is full of mothers, as museum educator Adelia Gregory discovered recently, and most of them are extraordinary.

Take Lilly Martin Spence: She not only made a living as a professional artist while her husband stayed home to raise their children, she did so in the early 19th century. Oddly, it is not clear how many children she had: Some sources say two, some eight, some 13. (Perhaps the two felt like eight, or the eight, 13).  In any case, she was indisputably a mother, and she is in the museum; a painting of hers from 1856 hangs on the fifth floor, of a coquettish-looking woman in the kitchen holding a spoonful of molasses with the provocative title “Kiss Me and You'll Kiss the 'Lasses.”

Spence’s painting will be on a new tour, “Extraordinary Women: Celebrating Mothers and Motherhood in Art through the Ages," that will be given at the Brooklyn Museum on Mother’s Day, Sunday, May 8.   The tour is part of a first-ever (and now sold out) Mother’s Day Brunch, when the museum will be full of about mothers and their families. The other three tours are given regularly -- Treasures of Ancient Egypt; "The Dinner Party" by Judy Chicago and Behind The Scenes in the Luce Study Center.  

Although the brunch and all four tours sold out soon after they were announced, the works that Adelia Gregory selected are on permanent display for any visitor to look at, at any time.

One of the most intriguing mothers on display dates back more than 3,000 years. It shows a limestone relief of Queen Nefertiti kissing one of her daughters.  “There is a cozy feeling here,” Gregory says as we look together at the work on the third floor, “but this could have been an expression of politics as much as affection” – an announcement of dynastic succession, the passing of power from one generation to the next. If so, it didn’t work: After the death of Nefertiti and her husband Akhenaten, their children did not succeed them. Nefertiti’s face in the sculpture was defaced, a political act.

There are 19 paintings in the museum by Mary Cassatt, the only American to be invited to exhibit with the French Impressionists. Many of Cassatt’s paintings picture a mother with her daughter, such as "Woman in a Red Bodice and Her Child" in the Luce Center on the fifth floor.  Mothers were indeed Cassatt’s most popular subject, although she herself was not a mother.

 A wood sculpture of mother and child, one of the most popular objects in the Africa collection on the first floor of the museum, comes from the Lulua people of the Congo, and was created in the 19th Century. The intricately decorated figures had a purpose: “They were given to women who had trouble conceiving or had had miscarriages,” Gregory says. Figure of a Mother and Child (Lupingu Lua Luimpe) was created for a prominent family in the community, Gregory says: “It is the work of a very skilled artisan.”

And then there is "The Dinner Party," which honors a whopping 1,038 women in history—39 women named in place settings around a large setting, and another 999 inscribed on the floor. How many of these were mothers? Abigail Adams was, of course, the second First Lady of the United States, giving birth to six children, one of whom became the President, like his father.  So was Mary Wollstonecraft, prominent 18th century women’s rights activist who, for better or worse, is probably best known now as the mother of Mary Shelley (also featured in The Dinner Party),  also a mother, but best known as the mother of Frankenstein. This is to say, in 1818 she wrote the novel "Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus," from which all Frankensteins derive.  These were all mothers. But was Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty?  It would be fitting if she were; it is a question the mothers visiting The Dinner Party on Mother’s Day can discuss.

 Adelia Gregory is not sure that she herself will be with her mother on Mother’s Day, even though, as it turns out, it happens to fall this year on her birthday. “My mother lives in Ohio,” she explains.  But whether her mother can make the trip or not, on this Mother’s Day, in the Brooklyn Museum, Gregory will not want for mothers.