If you were expecting a baby in 1963, you might expect to receive a “Baby Book” filled with pastel-colored illustrations of the awaited cherub, festooned with ribbons and attended by bunnies. Browsing through the baby shower gift aisle sixty years later suggests that narratives of pregnancy, birth, and early parenthood have remained persistently pastel since mid-century; bringing ambivalence to the party might still be less welcome than that gift-wrapped diaper pail. But in 2023, the pink and blue bubble just leaves too many stories out.
In the midst of their anticipatory joy, few prospective parents can be completely blithe to the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Along with the perennial anxieties, artworks currently on view in a set of exhibitions in Bloomington evince additional concerns associated with pregnancy in the United States – and Indiana in particular – in 2023, including the rising maternal mortality rate and decreasing access to health care. “You can’t talk about birth without the full spectrum of what reproduction is,” suggests Emily Zarse (M.F.A. ‘22, Fibers), curator of “Lineages of Birth.” “It’s miscarriage, it’s loss, it’s the choice not to have kids, it’s all of these different paths and making visibility for them.”
Zarse, who is currently pursuing Indiana University’s interdisciplinary M.A. in curatorship, conceived of a multi-venue art exhibition, oral history project, living archive, and set of community conversations to do just that. “Lineages of Birth” showcases the breadth and variety of some contemporary experiences of pregnancy, birth, and reproduction.The project is a university-community collaboration between the Kinsey Institute Library & Special Collections, IU Platform Arts and Humanities Laboratory, the former Bloomington Area Birth Services (BABS), and Tandem Birth Center, with the sponsorship of The Mellon Foundation. “Lineages” was prompted by the recent transfer of BABS’ archives to the Kinsey Institute. Operational from 1995 to 2014, BABS served as a resource center for pregnant people and new parents and an advocate for midwifery and alternative birth options.
Works by Eskenazi School faculty members Elise Putnam (visiting assistant professor of painting), Megan Young (visiting assistant professor of digital art), Christine Bruening (visiting assistant professor of digital art), and Melanie Pennington (lecturer in sculpture); Grunwald Gallery Program Coordinator Linda Tien; and Eskenazi alumni Yara Cluver (B.A., M.F.A.) and Heidi Dargle (B.F.A.) are featured in the three exhibitions that are part of “Lineages.” In entirely disparate mediums, these artists and others explore aspects of birth and reproduction that expand and complicate the prevailing narrative.
On view May 1-13 at the Cook Center in Maxwell Hall, Putnam’s multi-media installation “Preconception” deploys the artist’s self-portraiture practice to express the “liminal space of ‘pre-pregnancy’,” as Putnam describes it. (“Poetically,” as Zarse explains, this show and the two others are all installed in a “hallway or transitory space that the viewer has to pass through.”) A portrait of the fraught psychological space of “considering starting the reproductive journey to pregnancy (in Indiana in 2023),” as the artist writes, the installation includes figurative drawings on muslin and diaphanous scrims over the space’s windows, as well as a large inflatable sculpture suggestive of reproductive or digestive anatomy.
There’s not a baby in sight, nor a visibly pregnant figure in any of the drawings. This omission distinguishes the work among others referencing pregnancy and birth by artists such as Louise Bourgeois or Alice Neel, Putnam points out. “I’m not talking about birthing or mothering. There are artists who address that, but I have yet to come across work that contemplates becoming pregnant. This work is a visual response to this ‘in-between’ time,” only to be defined as such if a pregnancy ensues. The soft sculptural spill of pink tubes across the gallery’s floor embodies the prospective parent’s incipient curiosity – and perhaps apprehension – about her body’s internal life and its autonomy.
Young’s work also gives form to the formless, “the squishy stuff,” as she calls it. Young’s multi-media piece “Carry On” is included in “Birth by the Book,” a selection of artists’ books about birth and reproduction from the IU Wells Library Collection. (The inclusion of Young’s genre-defying piece bespeaks the expansiveness the artist’s book category seems to enjoy.) In a video and paired sculptural piece in the show as well as a complementary community digital archiving project, Young manifests her conviction “that personal histories are significant cultural artifacts worthy of preservation and consideration.” Her work explores how to instantiate the "sensation, and interaction, and the values we bring to [those histories] -- the imbued value.”
The video element of “Carry On” is a dynamic mapping of the artist’s body, her mother’s body, and her children’s bodies via LiDAR, a light-based geolocation technology. Young transferred a selection of the scan to a print on fabric then sewn into a tote bag, into which she has deposited clay eggs she and her children rolled by hand. A record of such painstaking and heterogeneous mapping and collecting, the work bespeaks a primal impulse to distill the essence of life and the ultimate futility of efforts to do so. “What do we carry?” Young wonders, “What do we hold on to from our lineage? What do we lose? What isn’t captured? What of my family can’t you meet? What comes through?”
As a part of the socially engaged component of her practice, Young is also contributing to the “Lineages” project by leading a community workshop on Friday, May 5 at the public library in which participants will create digital scans of physical objects that hold significance for them in terms of their birth story or family lineage. Participants will then have the option of adding their digital artifacts to the growing repository of works from around the world Young is gathering as part of a larger body of work, “With What We Could Carry.”
“Birth By the Book” includes 27 artist’s books from the Wells collection created between 1973 and 2023.
The “Lineages” project also includes a third exhibition at the Monroe County Public Library titled “Creative Rememberings of Birth” that aggregates birth art and stories from the community. In addition to the exhibitions, “Lineages” includes a birth story sharing session, community conversations about healthy child development, the history of midwifery, and maternal mortality, a BABS reunion, walking tours of the exhibitions, and a closing reception. To learn about “Lineages” events still to come this month see https://www.lineagesofbirth.com/events.
