What does it mean to be an artist and a mother?
A nice job done here with touring a new retrospective on Ree Morton’s career. (To experience it full-screen, as it should be, go here.)
From a T Magazine profile of Morton's work:
Having come to the conclusion that she was “totally unsuited” to nursing, Morton dropped out of school and married in 1956. Around 1966, she began taking evening classes at the University of Rhode Island; two years later, at the age of 32, she and her husband separated — they would later divorce — and Morton moved with her children to Pennsylvania, where she got an M.F.A. She worked for years without a dedicated studio, constructing sculptures in suburban basements and behind washer-dryer units. “I still wasn’t able to call myself an artist,” she recalled in a 1974 interview. “I was a mother, I had children, I had a family to take care of.” She went on to talk about how her teachers in art school would talk often about “being committed to your work.” That word — “commitment” — had, as Morton said, “a lot of implications that I couldn’t accept.”