Exhibition

Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood

9 Mar 2024 – 26 May 2024

Regular hours

Saturday
11:00 – 18:00
Sunday
11:00 – 18:00
Tuesday
11:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
11:00 – 18:00
Thursday
11:00 – 18:00
Friday
11:00 – 18:00

Save Event: Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood1

I've seen this1

People who have saved this event:

close

Arnolfini

Bristol
England, United Kingdom

Address

Travel Information

  • Most city centre bus services stop within walking distance of Arnolfini. The nearest stops are at The Centre and Queen Square.
  • Arnolfini is a 15 minute walk from Bristol Temple Meads railway station. A taxi rank can be found outside the station.
Directions via Google Maps Directions via Citymapper
Event map

Hayward Gallery Touring’s major group exhibition Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood plunges into the joys and heartaches, mess, myths and mishaps of motherhood through over 100 artworks, from the feminist avant-garde to the present day.

About

While the Madonna and Child is one of the great subjects of European art, we rarely see art about motherhood as a lived experience, in all its complexity. Acts of Creation: On Art and Motherhood will address this blind spot in art history, asserting the artist mother as an important – if rarely visible – cultural figure.

Featuring the work of more than sixty modern and contemporary artists, this exhibition will approach motherhood as a creative enterprise, albeit one at times tempered by ambivalence, exhaustion or grief. Acts of Creation will explore lived experience of motherhood, offering a complex account that engages with contemporary concerns about gender, caregiving and reproductive rights.

The exhibition will address diverse experiences of motherhood across three themes: Creation, which looks at conception, pregnancy, birth and nursing; Maintenance which explores motherhood and caregiving in the day-to-day; and Loss, which touches on miscarriage and involuntary childlessness, as well as reproductive rights. The heart of the exhibition is a series of revelatory self-portraits – a celebration of the artist as mother. 

Comments

Have you been to this event? Share your insights and give it a review below.