Our Mothers Ourselves: Legacies that Shape Us

Co-curated by Adrienne Defendi and Ellen Konar, Our Mothers Ourselves brings together 14 photo-based artists who turn family photographs, heirlooms, and personal archives into reflections on motherhood, personhood, memory, and loss. 

This traveling exhibition features more than 100 works spanning photography, collage, printmaking, textiles, and three-dimensional forms.

Moving between love and longing, admiration and estrangement, remembrance and loss, the exhibition considers the women not only as mothers, but as individuals shaped by histories and experiences of their own. In doing so, Our Mothers Ourselves creates a point of entry into questions that resonate across generations: What do families preserve? What disappears? Which stories are passed down? And which must be recovered or reconstructed?

Family Archives as Personal and Historical Record

Throughout the exhibition, intimate family histories intersect with larger histories of displacement, incarceration, aging, grief, and resilience.

Collaborating artists Ellen Konar and Steve Goldband reflect on the life of Konar’s mother through a treasured silk shirt she concealed during Nazi persecution, now preserved as a material connection to her experience, survival, and resilience. 

Jerry Takigawa draws on heirlooms and collaged archival materials to give voice to his mother’s untold stories of  Japanese American incarceration during World War II. 

In response to her mother’s dementia, Charlotte Niel embroiders her mother’s photos with flowers, beads, and fabrics, honoring her mother’s craft and her history, while acknowledging the fragility of memory. 

Marsha Guggenheim, who lost both parents at a young age, uses blurred and distorted family portraits to explore unanswered questions that remain after loss. 

Photography, Textiles, Collage, and Material Memory

Rather than simply preserving family archives, these artists transform them. Photographs and personal objects are layered, obscured, embroidered, collaged, recontextualized, and reconstructed, making the act of remembrance visible within the work itself. 

Featuring work by Federica Armstrong, Allison Calteux, Dyana DeCoteau-Dyess, Adrienne Defendi, Ellen Konar and Steve Goldband, Marsha Guggenheim, Priya Suresh Kambli, Kathleen McDonald, Lianne Milton, Charlotte Niel, Jerry Takigawa*, JP Terlizzi, and Nic Umbs, Our Mothers Ourselves reveals the connections across distinct cultural backgrounds, family histories, and artistic practices. 

Together, the works invite audiences to consider what Defendi and Konar describe as “the legacies that we inherit and those we will pass on.”

Exhibition Format and Why Audiences Respond

Maternal inheritance is not necessarily sentimental. It may reside in the absence of her voice, a concealed shirt, an aged letter, or a familiar perfume bottle. Our Mothers Ourselves is a space for audiences to reflect on what they preserve, what they reinterpret, but ultimately what they choose to carry forward.

For host venues, Our Mothers Ourselves offers opportunities for intergenerational community engagement, educational programming, facilitated conversations, and storytelling centered on family history, memory, migration, caregiving, and inheritance. Its combination of fine art photography, mixed media, textiles, and archival materials also supports interdisciplinary connections across art, history, cultural studies, gender studies, and material culture. 

Designed for flexible installation, this traveling art and photography exhibition adapts to a range of gallery sizes and institutional contexts, including art and history museums, university galleries, libraries, and cultural centers.

*Exhibits USA host venues may recognize Jerry Takigawa’s work from Resilience—A Sansei Sense of Legacy.