The Glorious Mothers: Motherhood as Political Art Now
A collective born in Italy during the pandemic, facing the challenge of being both artists and mothers between creative practice, activism, and shared residencies.
This article about The Glorious Mothers was originally written and published by me in Italian on Artribune, the leading Italian magazine for contemporary art. You can read the original version here.
If you’re new to this wider project, start here: Feminism in Art Isn’t a Style: It’s a Battle Over Visibility.
You can also browse the full archive in my Feminism category.
The “Gloriose”– Sara Basta, Cristina Cusani, Mariana Ferratto, Francesca Grossi, Giulia Iacolutti, Vera Maglioni, Caterina Pecchioli, Lorena Peris, Dafne Salis, Miriam Secco.
The name sounds triumphant, almost solemn. In truth, it’s an ironic, even paradoxical gesture. The Glorious Mothers is a collective of artist-mothers that emerged in Italy during Covid: women scattered across different cities, some with partners and others alone, united by a simple but urgent need, not to remain isolated.
For many who become mothers, art can turn into a labyrinth of silence, a condition people often pretend not to see. “Glorious” becomes, then, a deliberate reversal: if the art system refuses to recognize motherhood, they choose to celebrate it, to claim it as glory, as an act of resistance, politics, and creation.
When I first encountered their voices, I understood that the adjective wasn’t decorative. It was a radical form of defiance: a way of declaring that motherhood, too often pushed into invisibility, carries power, dignity, and the spark of creation itself.
The Invisible Struggles of Artist-Mothers
Lorena Peris: When I was young and working with a gallerist, he warned me that if I wanted a career, I must never have children otherwise my creativity would be exhausted by them. I work so that sentences like that will no longer be uttered, because that mentality is the problem: it allows us to be creative only where we don’t disturb anyone, in the role of ‘Italian mothers’. But we are artists first and, if we wish, mothers as well.
From the outside, art is often imagined as freedom, no bosses, no constraints. But in reality, it’s made of unpredictable hours, constant travel, openings, and residencies that require weeks away from home. In that structure, children rarely fit.
The Glorious Mothers decided to give voice to what is usually hidden. For an artist-mother there are no parental leaves, no safety nets. Every pause becomes a risk: exhibitions are lost, networks fade, invitations disappear. Slowly, one slips to the margins of a system that rewards only perpetual visibility.
They react by creating small constellations of mutual support, sharing time, listening, and advice. But they know well: solidarity alone is not enough. The problem is not personal; it’s structural, cultural, and deeply systemic.
Listening to them, I realized how rarely this issue appears in contemporary-art discourse. As if an entire slice of reality had been deliberately erased from the official narrative.
Turning Limit into Language
Francesca Grossi It’s absolutely necessary that artistic labor be recognized.
These difficulties do not remain wounds to endure; they become artistic material. Some artists involve their children directly in their works, transforming play into creative process. Others make motherhood itself their field of research, letting the relationship between mother and child unfold as image, gesture, or sound.
A four-hand drawing, a performance welcoming a child’s presence, a piece born from daily intimacy, all become art. The border between life and practice dissolves.
Children are not distractions to manage but creative subjects, companions in research, small co-authors. They are inspiration, living matter. In this light, motherhood ceases to be a limitation and becomes fertile terrain for new forms of making.
Networks and Residencies
Mariana Ferratto We should move beyond the nuclear-family model toward shared forms of care, where raising children concerns everyone.
The Glorious Mothers are not alone. They connect with similar collectives across Europe, sharing both struggles and strategies. Since 2022 they have organized an annual residency for artists with children, the first of its kind in Italy, as a meeting ground for practice and reflection.
In 2024 their residency format caught the attention of one of Italy’s major art institutions: the Pistoletto Foundation / Cittadellarte, which became an essential ally. Together they are developing new collaborative programs, and the last two residencies took place there.
Here, children are not problems to solve but welcomed presences. Dedicated workshops allow them to participate, while mothers work in the studio. Out of this coexistence arise collective laboratories intertwining care, body, desire, and pleasure, culminating in performances and public presentations.
Their evolving manifesto is not a fixed text but a living process. One residency bore the title How to Blow Up a Manifesto? An invitation to explode the iconography of the mother, to free it from patriarchal clichés, to imagine her as queer, plural, and gloriously undisciplined.
What They Want to Change
Caterina Pecchioli: To secure rights for artist-mothers and artist-parents, the first step is to recognize the figure of the visual artist itself. In Italy there isn’t even an ATECO code for this profession. Our rights should be part of a broader reform of cultural labor, which remains largely unrecognized, underpaid, and unprotected.
Their aim is not just to denounce but to propose. Museums and galleries should include child-friendly spaces, inclusive residencies, recognition for career breaks, specific support funds, parental leave for artists, and schedules compatible with care. None of this is utopia; it’s a possible reform, if institutions dare to imagine differently.
Above all, it’s a cultural shift: acknowledging that motherhood enriches art rather than obstructing it. Today, being a mother often means becoming invisible. The Glorious Mothers want to reverse that logic and affirm that motherhood is a shared value, not a silent sentence.
A Hope for the Future
Cristina Cusani: If children’s presence within the art system were encouraged rather than avoided, artists like us could finally feel part of it, not excluded.
A single vision runs through their words: a future where new generations no longer must choose between career and motherhood; where children participate in creation, not exclusion, where care is finally recognized as both cultural resource and political act.
The residencies in Biella are only the beginning, but they already prove that another model is possible. Art can welcome. It can open new paths. It can create spaces where fragility and strength coexist.
Why I Wrote About Them
I decided to tell the story of The Glorious Mothers after reading Santa Nastro’s book Mamme nell’arte. That reading opened my eyes to an issue I had ignored for too long. It’s not merely private, it’s a fracture running through the entire art world.
Until a few years ago, I imagined art as an autonomous sphere, pure and detached from life. But then I began looking more carefully around me: among my most accomplished artist friends, almost none had children. Even among independent artists, that absence was glaring. A collective silence, more eloquent than any theory. I realized that emptiness is not neutral; it exposes a system still unable to embrace.
At the same time, I saw that motherhood, in all its complexity and power, is already art in itself, a radical creative gesture that shapes bodies, time, and imagination.
Writing about them was also a personal reckoning. Because art can no longer afford to exclude. If it truly imagines futures, it must include mothers. It must declare, once and for all, that even in fragility there is glory.
I will continue to follow them, and, in my own small way, lend voice to their cause. It’s a just cause. And I hope others will join, until this voice no longer lingers at the margins but becomes central to our idea of what art can be.
