Amir H. Fallah, Ellen Lesperance, Joyce Kozloff, and other artists share their experiences with residencies.

In hell’s innermost circle, exhausted parents search eternally for tiny Lego pieces needed to complete rocket ships, houses, and robots. This particular corner of Hades has been my home since the arrival of COVID-19. While artists without children post images of themselves making more work than ever, I and other artist parents I know are struggling to find time and energy for the studio at night, or working on the kitchen table while keeping an eye on the kids, or making no work at all.

Like all primary caregivers, since March I have simultaneously run a home school, a restaurant, and a hyperactive playground that occasionally becomes a boxing ring. The coronavirus challenges the canard that art (and all work) requires a devotion incompatible with family life. The virus also demolishes the corollary: that raising children requires the sacrifice of all else. With the quarantine’s interruption of virtually all forms of childcare and education, we acknowledge as never before that professional work must be somehow integrated with family life.

Artist-parents have always faced unique challenges. Art careers are forged in an informal economy where personal networks generate opportunities for exhibitions and introductions to curators, collectors, and other important players. It can be of major importance to be present at the right parties and openings, and to build relationships with other artists by visiting their studios. But for people with young children, it has always been a problem to attend openings that primarily occurred at night, and now, without schools or daycare, it requires new levels of innovation to make any art at all. The problems of working at home with children are now faced by parents in virtually every industry.

In 1992, M/E/A/N/I/N/G magazine produced a forum titled “On Motherhood, Art, and Apple Pie,” in which artist-mothers were asked to discuss their experience. Multimedia artist Myrel Chernick wrote: “There is little time left to make contacts, go to openings, call and meet people, arrange studio visits, those things that are necessary to keep oneself visible, to be considered for shows.” Twenty-eight years later, I found myself in the same situation before COVID-19 struck, and whenever the art scene is able to fully reopen I will remain in this situation, along with most other artist-parents I know.

There is an awful saying: you can either be a good artist or a good mother, but you can’t be both. In an episode of Recording Artists, a series produced by the Getty Research Institute, artist Simone Leigh comments, “I was aware that the world was interested in shaming me at every turn for being an artist and a mother at the same time.” Mary Kelly’s renowned “Post-Partum Document” (1975) (a six-part conceptual series focused on Kelly’s relationship with her young son) deals with her guilt about continuing her career while also raising a child. These are powerful conflicts stemming not only from cultural attitudes, but from the fact that each day offers only 24 hours, which is usually not enough.

In the popular imagination, artists are not supposed to be responsible parents, changing diapers, and picking up their kids from school on time. Mainstream culture wants artists to be the romanticized “other”: shamans, enfants terrible, drug- and alcohol-fueled selfish geniuses who play the foil to a stable workaday existence. Our archetypes are the childless Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock, or Picasso, whose concerns revolved primarily around himself.

This iconography is part and parcel of patriarchal oppression, serving as a firewall to keep women out of the fine arts and the professional world in general. Women are put on the pedestal of motherhood in order to keep them there, out of men’s way. Professional discrimination against pregnant women in all fields is well documented, including within the art apparatus.

When women become mothers, their artistic futures are far more likely to be questioned than when men become fathers, because it’s assumed that the father is not taking care of the kids anyway. In “The Motherload,” a 2018 essay for KCET’s Artbound, activist and artist Micol Hebron wrote: “I have heard countless stories of what happens to women artists when they become pregnant or declare that they are starting a family: galleries drop them from their rosters […] exhibitions get postponed or canceled.”

Sometimes, even the gallerist gets bitten: In his book BOOM, Michael Shnayerson reports that when Marianne Boesky was pregnant in 2006, her artist Takashi Murakami left her for the childless Larry Gagosian, declaring, “You’re lactating, you can’t be my business partner.” Journalist and editor Jori Finkel puts it well in her documentary Artist and Mother when she says, “motherhood is the last taboo in contemporary art.”

Today, family structures are fluid and take many forms. It is no longer unusual for fathers to be deeply involved in child-raising, and both parents often work. There are families like mine, in which the father fills the role of primary caretaker, and there are families with two fathers, two mothers, single parents, and everything in between. Without question, artist-mothers still suffer discrimination most acutely, but we are all in this trap together, and it is time to broaden our thinking about how to dismantle it.

There are too many conditions of being an artist-parent to discuss in just one essay, so I will limit myself here to examining one specific zone of difficulty: residencies. I began writing this just before the pandemic arrived, and since the virus took hold, most residencies have been closed. This caesura provides an opportunity to reflect on the ways residency programs both succeed and fail to serve artist-parents adequately, and what possibilities exist for the situation to improve when residencies reopen.

Residencies and the Parent Problem

The art apparatus is designed for people who do not have children at home. Residencies are a prime example. Artist residencies and travel grants facilitate extended focus that helps generate a body of work. They are also excellent ways to meet other artists, writers, and curators that can help further a career. But residencies are predicated on the idea that an artist can just pack up and disappear for months at a time, even a year or more.

“I had to turn down four different residencies last year,” artist Amir H. Fallah told me, “my son is four years old and my wife has a full-time job.” Artist Umar Rashid is in a similar position: “My wife works, I cook the meals, and it would be far too large a strain on our family for me to leave for a four-month residency. I was once gone for Fountainhead’s month-long residency,” Rashid laughed, “and my wife let me know it will never happen again, which I understand.”