Conversation with Laura Silagi and Deborah Krall, Los Angeles, 2002

Laura Silagi and Deborah Krall introduce themselves as part of Mother Art, a collective founded in 1973 together with Suzanne Siegel, with various members over the years. Their activities continued until 1985, after which they pursued individual projects. A retrospective in 2000 allowed them to revisit their collective history. Mother Art’s narrative-driven projects addressed social and political issues through personal stories, performances, and installations.

In 1975 and 1976, Mother Art produced two exhibitions titled By Mothers Show, where they invited artists dealing with motherhood. These exhibitions were followed by performances in laundromats in 1977. Mother Art explains: “The idea was that we were going to take the topic of domestic work into the public… we hung clotheslines and the duration of the piece was the time it would take to wash and dry clothes… and we invited a lot of people from the art world and whoever happened to be doing their laundry was there.” In the work Choice (1981), Mother Art created a series of installations and performances narrating the traumatic stories of women who had undergone illegal abortions, incorporating slides and live acting. During the conversation, Mother Art made an eerily prescient statement: “All the kinds of gains people make have to be guarded. It’s also a very tenuous situation because if one or two Supreme Court justices retire or die in office and George Bush replaces them with his own people, then the whole right to abortion in this country could just go away.”

Mother Art also addressed homelessness, documenting the diverse stories of homeless women through photographs and narratives, creating installations that showcased their experiences. They tackled immigration issues, particularly focusing on women from Central America who fled political unrest and poverty. Each woman’s story was represented through personal artifacts in assemblages, attempting to give expression to their struggles. In The Dining Room Table (1985), Mother Art honored activist Barbara Avedon, founder of Another Mother for Peace, by creating works that demonstrated how activism could be carried out from one’s home. They also highlighted midlife challenges in their retrospective exhibition with a piece titled Running Out of Time (2000).

Mother Art was part of the first year of the Woman’s Building but faced challenges as it did not support women with children. They recall: “Judy Chicago didn’t believe you could have children and be an artist. So as a reaction to that... the first thing we did was create a playground, which gave a space for children to be.”