An upcoming art show in Northampton wants to highlight the complexities of – and expand the definitions of – parenting and caretaking.
The exhibition “Taking Care: Parenthood in a Political Climate” will run Wednesday, Oct. 8, through Thursday, Oct. 30, in the Split Level Gallery at 33 Hawley. It will have its opening reception as part of October’s Arts Night Out on Friday, Oct. 10, from 5 to 8 p.m.
Curator Dara Herman Zierlein, who is also a participating artist in the exhibition, got the idea after being part of other art shows that had a “motherhood” theme. She wanted to do a show about caretaking, without limiting it to moms or traditional families.
“People who had to take care of their older parents or if they were taking care of a partner or a relative that was sick, that was also a form of becoming a parent,” she said. One of her friends, for example, is the caretaker for both of his own parents.
“I mean, that is parenting,” she said. “This is really ‘taking care.’”
For artist Jon Schluenz, who had been his father’s caretaker, his piece, “Nature Boy,” is an assemblage of inherited objects he received after his father died. In his artist statement, he described the piece as “an attempt to acknowledge the quiet caregiver, and transfigure the mess of grief and the weight of a handed-down history.”
“For me, this piece was a way to work through the grief of losing your father, but also deals with what it means to have gone through that experience as a caregiver but coming out the other side of it and figuring out what to do with all of that,” he said.
For Zierlein, the importance of caretaking also extends to the obligation of care that authority figures – namely, police – have to their communities. One of her pieces in the show is about Sonia Massey, a Black woman who was shot and killed by a police officer in her own home after she called 911 for help. In the work, Massey stands at a boiling pot of water – what she was doing before she was killed – as steam rises above and around her with the words “Say her name,” followed by Massey’s name written several times. Underneath, on two potholders, is the text, “Stop killing Black people when they are calling for help.”
Zierlein wanted to highlight Massey’s story because she thought it needed more attention, but also because a story like that “really triggered me as a mother,” she said, “as a person who is depending on the police” to respond safely when someone needs them.
Artist Kamil Peters will be showing “Woman and Child,” a piece based on his own childhood as the son of a Black single mother. Peters, now a parent to a 13-year-old boy himself, said, “My son is not a handful, but things happen.”
That included, for example, a woman taking photos of his son in public and calling the police, thinking (wrongly) that the boy was part of a group of young people harassing her child.
“As the artist,” he said, “it’s the job to document the times, and I’m not reinventing the wheel, I’m just saying, ‘Yes, it’s still here, and it will continue to be here. As a matter of fact, it’s getting worse.’”
“I don’t have a political stance,” he added, “but I know what I deal with every day.”
Beyond that, the show touches on the intersections of other political issues and caretaking – things like, for example, LGBTQ rights or reproductive rights. In one of Zierlein’s pieces, an ice cream truck has a sign rejecting LGBTQ customers.
“I’ve never experienced that kind of treatment before, but it exists,” said Zierlein, whose son is gay. For people who might not be otherwise exposed to homophobia or hear about it in the news, she said, “Maybe a piece of artwork would draw them in. They’d be like, ‘Oh, what’s going on?’”
Zierlein wants a sense of empathy-building to pervade the rest of the show.
“I really hope they walk away with a little view into someone else’s struggle and that they can just be a little more empathetic and a little more tolerant of people around you, because you just don’t know what people are going through,” she said.
Admission to the show is free. Participating artists include Dara Herman Zierlein, Ariel Bordeaux, Cheryl Rezendes, Ed Moret, Gaia Abraxas, Jon Schluenz, Kamil Peters, Peter O Zierlein, Rosalind Brenner, and Ruth O’Mara.