Looking for a way to celebrate Mother’s Day with your art-loving mom? Check out California public television channel KCET’s 1-hour film Artist and Mother, part of its Artbound series, now streaming online and screening at the Cantor Arts Center in San Francisco next week. The documentary breaks apart the patriarchal myth that mothers cannot also be dedicated artists, or that motherhood is a one-dimensional subject for art. Four contemporary artists who have children—Rebecca Campbell, Andrea Chung, Tanya Aguiñiga, and Kenyatta A.C. Hinkle—share how the experience has influenced their creative output, while curators and writers, including Helen Molesworth and The Art Newspaper’s Los Angeles correspondent Jori Finkel, look at how art history and the market have viewed women who wanted to have both a family and a career. “Why don’t we assume that when a person becomes a parent, that their levels of human experience become so much more complex and expanded? That their works should be valued more not less?” asks the art professor and interdisciplinary artist Micol Hebron towards the end of the film. Or, as Hinkle puts it when talking about her son Johari: “Every day is an instant inspiration, just waking up to him.”
