Mother
Site: 120710
Jan 10 – 31
Curators: Natasha Hoehn
Description: "Mother" gathers artists who are excavating the oldest, most shape-shifting force we know: Mothering. The act of making, tending, holding, breaking, and becoming. Rather than defining “mother” as a role or identity, the works in this exhibition treat it as an elemental impulse, a generative engine that builds worlds as easily as it dismantles them. Across sculpture, painting, textiles, sound, film, and written language, the artists explore the ways care can be both tender and volcanic, how lineage can illuminate or obscure, and how the daily labor of sustaining life coexists with myth, memory, and revolt. The pieces move between the intimate and the archetypal: a small gesture becomes a tectonic shift; a universal symbol arrives cracked, reimagined, or lovingly defaced. In a cultural moment saturated with performative dominance, where extractive, competitive, and hyper-individualized modes of power often shape public life, Mother proposes a counter-framework. The exhibition elevates relational intelligence, interdependence, and generative attention as vital creative alternatives. Here, power is not asserted through force or spectacle but cultivated through connection, insight, focus, and care. www.thisisnorthstreet.org This exhibition features work from the 2025 North Street Project cohort, a group of artists who gathered over many months to explore mothering as a creative, philosophical, and social inquiry. Through shared prompts, conversations, experiments, and fieldwork, the cohort collectively probed what it means to make art from practices of care, repair, and imagination, especially within systems that undervalue them. Their work reflects the textured dialogues, tensions, and revelations that emerged during this process. The North Street Project is an artist-driven initiative designed to help artists move into the next stage of their work. Through structured support, community exchange, and deep engagement with personal sources of inspiration, North Street provides a space where artists can reconnect to what animates their practice. The project centers curiosity, collaboration, and the slow-building of creative momentum, helping artists locate both each other and themselves in their evolving trajectories. Taken together, Mother is not a portrait but a constellation. It invites viewers to consider mothering as a form of world-building: messy, porous, inventive, and profoundly human. In this gathering of perspectives, the maternal is reclaimed not as a biological fact or sentimental trope, but as a radical, expansive framework for making meaning and making art.
