Mamme nell’arte (Mothers in Art)

A Quiet Book That Loudly Redefines the Art World

I put it in my bag.
I wasn’t supposed to have time for this book.
It was summer; too many deadlines, too many half-finished things, too many friends asking for attention. I was tired.
But I had these couple of days lying on the beach. A sliver of freedom. A small window of stillness.

Santa Nastro is an Italian art journalist, critic, and curator, specializing in contemporary art and cultural communication. She collaborates with major art magazines, including Artribune, where she is senior editor. Her work focuses on new artistic languages, curatorial projects, and the relationship between art, media, and society.

So I opened Mamme nell’arte (Mothers in Art) by Santa Nastro anyway.

And something shifted.

I began reading with a single image in my mind:

Catherine Opie’s Self-Portrait/Nursing (2004).
A body turned forward. A child suckling.
It’s not a sweet picture. It’s an act of war. An offering. A claim.
It holds motherhood and queerness, nurture and pain, in one defiant, unapologetic gesture.

That image lingered as the stories of Mamme nell’arte unfolded.
This isn’t a manifesto. It’s not a nostalgic tribute. It’s a rupture. 

Santa Nastro doesn’t ask whether art and motherhood are compatible. She shows what happens when they collide, when they’re forced to coexist in a world that barely tolerates either on their own.

The women in this book, artists, curators, critics, educators, don’t offer glossy solutions. They share survival strategies.
Some carve out time in impossible schedules. Some bring their children to residencies. Some press pause on their practice. Some refuse to. Some hide their status as mothers to protect their careers. Others place it front and center.
What emerges is not a linear story, but a mosaic: fractured, honest, alive.

One of the most powerful moments in the book comes with the story of The Glorious Mother, a collective born during the pandemic. These artists didn’t separate art and care. They didn’t wait for better conditions. They folded life into work and made both visible. Their children aren’t props or obstacles, they’re part of the aesthetic, the rhythm, the presence. It’s not an easy solution. It’s a radical one.

Reading this, lying in the sun, felt strangely dissonant.
But also necessary. Because Nastro’s book is not about struggle alone. It’s about a quiet form of resistance that rarely makes headlines.
Not the kind of activism you photograph. The kind you live. Every day.

And then, there’s the language.
In a few sections of the book, Nastro shifts how Italian itself is written. Instead of using gendered suffixes like -o or -a, she replaces them with a reversed “e”: Ɛ.

CuratorƐ. ArtistƐ. OperatorƐ.

At first glance, it might look odd. Then you realize it’s doing something profound.
In a language where every noun forces you into a gendered form, the “Ɛ” breaks the binary without erasing anyone.
It’s a typographic crack in a rigid system, a space of breath, of ambiguity, of inclusion.

She doesn’t use it everywhere. That’s what makes it more powerful.
It appears, disrupts, and reminds you: even grammar is political. Even reading is a choice.

What Mamme nell’arte does so beautifully is show that care is not an interruption of art—it is a kind of art. A form of composition. A logic of time.
And it exposes how much the art world still depends on care while refusing to acknowledge it.

Because let’s be honest: the only place motherhood has been historically “celebrated” in Western art is in religious painting, where the Madonna is silent, glowing, and unthreatening.
She’s an icon. Not a woman.
Her body is sacred, but her labor is absent. Her pain is sanitized. Her humanity removed.
That’s not representation. That’s myth.

In Mamme nell’arte, we get something else entirely.
Mothers who miss deadlines. Who breastfeed during openings. Who lose visibility. Who gain a new voice.
Mothers who rage, pause, continue, collapse, and reinvent.

I’m not a mother, but this book reached me.

Because it’s also about fragility, urgency, and not waiting for the system to change.
It’s about all the ways we keep going, even when everything tells us to stop.

I read most of it on the beach. Sand in my shoes. Salt on the pages.
The sun burned a little too much.
And still, I didn’t stop reading.
Because I knew, with a strange and sudden clarity, that this book isn’t just documenting reality.
It’s building a new one.

The book is written in Italian, and for now, its readership may remain mostly within that linguistic and cultural context.
But the questions it raises, and the truths it tells, deserve a wider audience.
So I hope that with this article, I’ve captured at least a fraction of its essence.
Because Mamme nell’arte isn’t just a necessary book.
It’s one that urgently needs to be seen from a broader, international perspective.

Mamme nell’arte. Artiste e operatrici culturali nella sfida della maternità (Mothers in Art. Artists and Cultural Workers in the Challenge of Motherhood) by Santa Nastro

ISBN
ISBN-13 / EAN: 979-1256145096

Publisher
Castelvecchi, Fuoriuscita series, 2025