How a group of artist-mothers in postwar San Francisco refused the centuries-old belief that a woman could not make art while also raising children. For most of modern history, to be an artist and a mother was to embody a contradiction in terms. This “awful dichotomy,” as painter Alice Neel put it, pitted artmaking against caretaking and argued that the best art was made at the expense of family and futurity. But in San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, a group of artists gathered around Ruth Asawa (1926–2013) began to reject this dominant narrative. In Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury , Jordan Troeller analyzes this remarkable moment. Insisting that their labor as mothers fueled their labor as artists, these women redefined key aesthetic concerns of their era, including autonomy, medium specificity, and originality. Delving into the archive, where the traces of motherhood have not yet been erased from official history, Troeller reveals Ruth Asawa’s personal and professional dialogue with several other artist-mothers, including Merry Renk, Imogen Cunningham, and Sally Woodbridge. For these women, motherhood was not an essentialized identity, but rather a means to reimagine the terms of artmaking outside of the patriarchal policing of reproduction. This project unfolded in three broad areas, which also structure the book’s chapters: domesticity and decoration; metaphors for creativity; and maternal labor in the public sphere, especially in the public schools. Drawing on queer theory and feminist writings, Troeller argues that in belatedly accounting for the figure of the artist-mother, art history must reckon with an emergent paradigm of artmaking, one predicated on reciprocity, caretaking, and futurity. Included in Hyperallergic 's Favorite Art Books of 2025 "Energizing and brilliant." — The New Republic "A groundbreaking account of mother-artists who shaped the course of midcentury art via motherhood itself." — Kirkus Reviews “Troeller has crafted a lucid and ludic portrait not of a singular artist, but of an artist among other artists. This deeply researched and insightful book models non-patriarchal forms of both making art and narrating its history, reminding us that taking care of children and making art — be it public art, community work, with children, or for children — are radical acts of parenting and anti-totalitarian making.” — Hyperallergic "A remarkable book." — Alta Journal “Expansive and deeply insightful, Jordan Troeller’s book looks anew at how Ruth Asawa joined creativity and mothering within a community of artist-mothers in San Francisco at midcentury. Here we have an ideal model for how to upend longstanding patriarchal ideals of artmaking, and to instead understand the artist-mother’s work through silence, fragmented form, and collaborative care.” —Sarah Hamill, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Sarah Lawrence College; author of David Smith in Two Dimensions “In this thoughtful and lucid book, art and life are inseparably interwoven. Troeller both centers maternity as a daily creative practice and situates it within an expansive matrix of intergenerational and extrafamilial affections and relations. This well-researched and theoretically adept analysis offers a challenge to entrenched assumptions about gender, family, biography, and how art history is to be written.” —David J. Getsy, Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History, University of Virginia; author of Queer Behavior “Jordan Troeller’s brave and capacious study of Ruth Asawa and her circle of artist-mothers is a powerful maternal counternarrative, asking us to reconsider what we know art to be, and showing us how family, home, and community can and do influence artists’ approach to making.” —Tara McDowell, Associate Professor and Director of Curatorial Practice at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia; author of The Householders: Robert Duncan and Jess Jordan Troeller is Junior Professor of Contemporary Art and Aesthetic Practices at Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, where she leads the research group The M/Other Project: Creativity, Procreation, and Contemporary Art, funded by the VolkswagenStiftung.