Erika Diamond explores the fragility and resilience of the human body using materials that echo the properties of skin. Born to ballet dancers, Diamond creates work that is deeply informed by the expressive qualities of the body, the ephemeral nature of touch, and the power of presentation. A mentee of renowned artist Sonya Clark, Diamond examines textiles as conceptual skins that are protective yet permeable. Her work often incorporates materials like bullet-proof Kevlar and mirrored vinyl, which serve as metaphors for vulnerability, protection, and identity.

Eggshell Shirt – Business Casual (2022) is a meticulously quilted eggshell garment meditating on self-preservation and the complexity of queer experience. Diamond reflects, “As a queer woman, I walk through the world with a few extra layers of caution. I think a lot about protective exteriors, perceived fragility, and the paradox of safety and visibility. I find softness through breakage and strength in numbers.” The artist performed in a similar eggshell garment, inviting participants to hug her—an act that allowed both her skin and the fragile armor to register the physical imprints of the interaction.

As an artist working in Asheville, North Carolina, Diamond honors the labor and resilience of communities rebuilding after Hurricane Helene in Eggshell Work Glove (right) (2025), a piece reminiscent of heavy-duty gloves. Crafted from eggshells and tulle, she describes the work as a love letter to volunteers and survivors, highlighting the strength found in collective effort. In Houston, where the impact of past hurricanes still resonates, the glove serves as a powerful reminder of the fragility of our environment and the strength of communities in times of crisis.

Through these works, Diamond invites viewers to reflect on the dualities of protection and exposure, vulnerability and resilience. Her use of everyday materials transforms the mundane into the extraordinary, creating artifacts commemorating touch, labor, and the enduring power of human connection. By centering queer visibility and community care, Diamond’s work challenges us to consider how we navigate the world—both the barriers we build and the connections we forge.

The Houston presentation of “We Are Each Other,” hosted within both HCCC’s and HMAAC’s galleries, extends the traveling exhibition’s tour, which was co-organized by the Cranbrook Art Museum, the High Museum of Art, and the Museum of Art and Design. Clark’s work centers on race and Black experience, and the exhibition is rooted in both audience and context, as each organizing institution is located in American cities with substantial populations of residents with a lineage to the African diaspora, and each is dedicated to celebrating and collecting contemporary art and craft traditions.

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By Jessica Fuentes

Design, like art, is shaped by the society from which it emerges. The look, feel, and functionality of our furniture, household objects, clothing, transportation, buildings, and more, reflect our values as well as our understanding of the world and our place within it. Art museum design collections are filled with beautiful tables, fabrics, vases, silverware, communication devices, and other relics of various times and places, but I don’t recall ever encountering a collection of speculums or breast pumps. While it is more seductive to investigate and be a steward of beloved cultural objects, the design of items like IUDs, menstrual products, and baby bottles should also be considered because they too tell a story about society. The places that preserve these objects are more likely to be science or history (rather than art) museums, which is why when institutions rooted in different disciplines collaborate, unexpected and relevant exhibitions materialize.

Such is the case with Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break Our Births, currently on view at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC). The inaugural iteration of the show debuted at The Mütter Museum and Historical Medical Library at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia in 2021. According to the museum’s website, the institution is a medical history museum that is dedicated to “sharing stories of medicine and public health.” The exhibition came about as a collaboration between the museum, the curatorial team (Juliana Rowen Barton, Michelle Millar Fisher, Zoë Greggs, Gabriella A. Nelson, and Amber Winick), and the Maternity Care Coalition, a local group of health and social justice activists supporting pregnant people and infants. Since 2021, Designing Motherhood has been hosted by the MassArt Art Museum in Boston (2022), The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center in Seattle (2023), ArkDes in Stockholm (2024), and now HCCC.

While the original installation included five sections — Means of Reproduction, Midwives, Parturition, Exam, and Milk — later iterations have included sections titled Our Bodies Ourselves, Postpartum, Temporary Bodies, Spaces, and Monitoring. HCCC’s presentation begins with a Craft + Caregiving section, which features baby carriers, receiving blankets, and two wooden sculptures of figures. The introductory gallery sets the tone of the exhibition and roots it in the venue’s mission to showcase contemporary craft. Designing Motherhood thoughtfully considers the functionality and shifts in the design of objects used in various aspects of reproductive care, as well as the social ideas, political actions, and policies that have informed these objects. Works by contemporary artists are presented alongside tools and items, adding a further dimension of societal reflection on concepts of reproductive health and mothering.

Sarah Darro, Curator and Exhibitions Director at HCCC, who organized the institution’s iteration of the show, explained her thoughts behind the Craft + Caregiving section, which is unique to the venue. She told me, “For me, the section reveals the deep craft traditions that undergird our first experiences of the material world — baby swaddling and wearing — which were represented in the original [exhibition] by the Kuddle Up Receiving Blanket and Snugli. My aim with this section was also to posit the overarching thesis that forms of caregiving are craft practices in and of themselves.”

A line in the introductory wall text explains, “Like craft, parenthood shares [the] intertwined properties of care, labor, embodied history, and familial knowledge.” As a mother and artist, I feel this intrinsically — my creative practices and approaches blend into and both inform and are informed by my parenting and caregiving. Last fall, when I visited the now-controversial Diaries of Home exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, I felt seen, validated, and represented as a parent/artist in a museum for the first time. Walking into Designing Motherhood was validating in a different sense, the display of the sometimes mundane aspects of womanhood paired with historical and contemporary contexts highlighted the importance of the small and large physical, visceral experiences of menstruation, self-care, childbirth, and caregiving.

Walking through the space, the designed objects across history reaffirmed an unsurprising narrative — they spoke of the long cultural history of midwifery and how the medicalization of childbearing in the U.S. has been shaped by men with seemingly little concern for the comfort, and at times even safety, of female-identifying people. One example being the 2019 Yona Speculum Prototype Sketch, a drawing of a device designed by women to be used in pelvic examinations. This new design thoughtfully considers various aspects of the experience by covering the traditional steel object in silicone and using a design that provides nearly silent use as opposed to the unnerving clicking and ratcheting sounds of the cold, intrusive, metal object that is often inserted into the vagina to dilate it.

Woven throughout the exhibition alongside the history aspect of the show are works by artists, some of which speak directly to the objects on view and others that more broadly depict and reflect the lived experiences of women and nonbinary people. Aimee Koran’s Chromed Life (Machine Pulled), a chrome-plated breast pump, at once glorifies the object and calls into question the ongoing labor women endure as they recover from childbirth and return to the workforce. Nearby are objects related to breastfeeding and bottle feeding, including an 1879 breast pump, nipple shields from the 1700s and 1800s, and a short documentary of a design hackathon, hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, called “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck.” While Koran and other artists included in the show like Alison Croney Moses, Deborah Willis, and Ani Liu, were part of other iterations of the exhibition, HCCC’s version brings in a slew of Texas artists — Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Liss LaFleur and Katherine Sobering, Francesca Fuchs, Madeline Donahue, Cynthia Mulcahy, Alicia Eggert, and others — into the conversation.

Datchuk’s One Tough Bitch, a photograph of a torso with porcelain shards partially covering a vertical abdomen scar, hangs in the Means of Reproduction section of the show. The piece alludes to kintsugi, the traditional Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. Though porcelain is often seen as fragile, it is a strong material and the gold edges of the broken pieces embrace the beauty of the fractures, rather than attempt to camouflage them. The photograph is a poignant reminder that a tear can be mended and that scars are visual representations of strength and endurance, not weakness.

Three works included in the show that speak directly to abortion rights are Cynthia Mulcahy’s Abortion Seed Library (War Garden series), Alicia Eggert’s OURs, and René Lee Henry’s CHOICE. Each of the pieces was created in 2022, the same year as the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade and Texas’ implementation of a law that prohibits abortions in most cases. Eggert’s neon work oscillates between three phrases, “OUR BODIES,” “OUR FUTURES,” and “OUR ABORTIONS.” Similarly, Henry’s copper, resin, and steel work simply states the word “CHOICE.” These works are defiant and unyielding. They are not seeking to discuss nuance or specific aspects of abortion rights, they simply state that people should have a choice regarding their bodies.

Mulcahy’s work draws on knowledge from cultures around the world and across history related to plants used to terminate pregnancies. “War garden,” another name for Victory gardens, refers to the vegetable, fruit, and herb gardens grown on residential and public land during World War I and World War II as a means to be self-sufficient during strenuous times. Women in states like Texas that have mandated near-total abortion bans find themselves in dire situations. A recent study has shown that maternal mortality rates in Texas increased 56% between 2019 and 2022. Mulcahy’s piece recognizes that we have the knowledge and ability to take control in a situation in which agency has been removed, on a political level and in a medical realm.

Designing Motherhood is multifaceted. It covers a lot of ground and highlights a myriad of lived experiences related to menstruation and reproduction. These topics, which are natural and essential parts of life, have historically been considered taboo, resulting in silence and misinformation across generations. The exhibition serves as an educational moment, emphasizing the necessity of inclusive design shaped by the people who will encounter these objects. It is a testament to the power of women’s and nonbinary people’s voices in a society where too often these voices fall on deaf ears.

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By May Howard

There is something to be said about exhibitions that miraculously emerge at the right place and time. Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (HCCC) presents an expansive material history of human reproduction. With over sixty objects of craft and design with additions by more than twenty contemporary artists, Designing Motherhood interrogates the politics behind who designed what, how, why, and for whom. By re-indexing the objects, practices, and infrastructures of the reproductive arc, this exhibition allows for a multidimensional definition of motherhood, recognizing how “mother” operates as a verb, noun, identity, and political category.

Designing Motherhood is conceived by a team of design curators and scholars including Juliana Rowan Barton, Michelle Millar Fisher, and Amber Winick; artist and arts administrator Zoë Greggs; and advisors from the Maternity Care Coalition in Philadelphia. It was first exhibited at the Mütter Museum and the Center for Architecture and Design in 2021 before traveling to venues in Boston, Seattle, and Stockholm. Now in its fifth iteration, the HCCC’s adaptation is unique in its focus on the relationship between caregiving and craftwork. The exhibition opens with a textile-rich installation that explores vessels of life and care: from baby carriers and blankets to the body itself. Curtains of varying pink shades encircle the walls, visually conjuring a womb or hospital room. One may recognize a suspended and neatly folded white cotton textile with alternating blue and pink stripes as the ubiquitous Kuddle-Up Blanket. Created during the mid-century in concert with the developing medical garments industry, it is the hallmark receiving blanket in hospitals today. Included, too, is the Snugli (the first mass-produced baby carrier in the US), which exploded in popularity in the 1960s due to its convenience, comfort, and hands-free design.

Emerson Croft’s Earth Baby Blanket (2021) shows how the handmade can intervene in the social apparatus of industrial design. The complexity of weave and nuances of green and gray in Croft’s textile represent a deeper intricacy of our social and cultural fabric that challenge conventions of gender encoded in the rigid colored striping of the Kuddle-Up Blanket. Indigenous baby carriers feature as well, including Sue Rigdon’s Cradleboard (1995), Tanya White’s photograph of a wahakura (2022), and Ger Xiong/Ntxawg Xyooj’s daim nyias (2021). Each demonstrates the diversity and ingenuity of Indigenous design histories while highlighting traditional craft technologies. In My Belly (2021) from the series My Black Body by Alison Croney Moses, the exposed disjointed seams, contrasting grains and progressive tones of wood express the physical and spiritual shape-shifting that occurs through pregnancy. Poetically rendered in cedarwood and milk paint, motherhood is made metamorphic like the wood she wields.

Among the many contemporary artists, the breast pump emerges as a typology of interest. The design trajectory of the device is visually charted with early mechanical models like Einar Egnell’s Egnell SMB Breast Pump, (c. 1956)—the result of a collaborative relationship with Sister Maja Kindberg to improve breast pumps in Stockholm hospitals—to the tube-and-cordless Willow Wireless Breast Pump (2021) that offers an accompanying mobile app. In Chromed Life (Machine Pulled) (2020), Aimee Koran uses alluringly bright red chrome-plated breast pumps to call attention to the hidden labor behind their use and the economic value of milk production. Works included by artists Ani Liu, Sara Hubbs, and Aimee Gilmore utilize milk as an artistic medium to drive their formal and ideological investigations.

Designing Motherhood attends to the systems of discrimination and domination that constitute this maternal material world as it is understood today.¹ The exhibition sheds light on the inhumane processes behind the technological advancements of tools like the speculum, and the distressing consequences of failed designs like the Dalkon Shield IUD. Dr. J. Marion Sims perfected his speculum design while seeking a treatment for vesicovaginal fistula by performing experimental surgical procedures on at least twelve unconsenting enslaved Black women between 1845 and 1849 without anesthetics. The Dalkon Shield, invented in 1968 by Dr. Hugh Davis and Irwin Lerner, led to over 300,000 filed claims and eighteen reported deaths due to severe uterine perforations and pelvic infections caused by the multifilament wick.² This incident led to widespread mistrust of IUDs as a form of birth control in the US and prompted the FDA to regulate their safety and efficacy.

With the political suppression of reproductive sovereignty, exhibitions such as this one are vital, especially in Texas, which is among the lowest-ranking states in reproductive health coverage, access and affordability as well as healthcare quality and prevention.³ These are matters of life and death. Designing Motherhood at the HCCC is admirable in its traversal of educational and activist registers. Even so, a more articulated presentation of maternal mortality and postpartum depression as they intersect with race and class would further contribute to the breadth of experiences of motherhood.⁴ A concentrated history of midwifery would engender much interest, for there are rich stories to elucidate of Indigenous and Black midwives who, for generations, cultivated infrastructures of home-based healthcare to serve women across the US South.

Toward the exhibition’s conclusion is a charming and intimate portrait of a mother breastfeeding her child captured in swaths of gestural paint. Mother and Child (1996) by Patti Lou Richardson is an ode to the artist’s daughter, Regá Richardson Waggett who was integral in drafting and passing the first breastfeeding law in Texas after witnessing a nursing mother forced to leave a Houston museum. This portrait is a reminder of how everyday refusals and acts of resistance, like Regá’s, can lead to critical change.

1]  See Hill Collins, Patricia. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 30th anniversary edition. New York: Routledge, 2022.

[2]  Rainey Horwitz, “The Dalkon Shield,” Embryo Project Encyclopedia, January 10, 2018. Accessed November 25, 2024. https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/dalkon-shield

[3]  “New Scorecard Offers State-by-State Ranking of Women’s Health and Reproductive Care,” The Commonwealth Fund, July 18, 2024. Accessed November 26, 2024. https://www.commonwealthfund.org/press-release/2024/new-scorecard-offers-state-state-ranking-womens-health-and-reproductive-care

[4]  “Insights into the U.S. Maternal Mortality Crisis: An International Comparison,” The Commonwealth Fund, June 4, 2024. Accessed November 26, 2024. ttps://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/2024/jun/insights-us-maternal-mortality-crisis-international-comparison

by Chris Becker

On view at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft through March 15, 2025, and organized by HCCC Curator and Exhibitions Director Sarah Darro, Designing Motherhood presents the science and strangeness of conception, birth, and childcare, as viewed through the prism of craft, design, and fine art. With over 60 objects spanning the past 50 years on display, including 10 works by Texas-based artists, there’s a lot to look at and some of it ain’t for the squeamish. But art, when it’s connecting you to what it means to be alive, isn’t always comfortable. “I consider all of these objects in the show art objects,” says Darro. “These objects hold a lot of power, and visitors are having very visceral reactions.”

Arriving for the first time in the Southern United States after a contentious, post-Dobbs presidential election, where polarizing notions of motherhood and so-called “family values” were weaponized for political gain, Designing Motherhood is a timely show about timeless experiences. Having originated in Philadelphia at the Mütter Museum at The College of Physicians of Philadelphia and the Center for Architecture and Design and curated by no less than five design and childhood researchers, historians, and writers, the exhibit’s title is a bit of a misnomer, as parenting is presented and explored in an expansive way. Upcoming exhibit-related, public programming includes a discussion about queer parenthood and a talk on the unseen and underappreciated infrastructures of care that support families.

The HCCC iteration is also the first to focus on craft, a discipline defined by its materials, process, and how technique is passed down to succeeding generations. “For me, care feels synonymous with craft,” says Darro. Indeed, the hand of the craftsperson is imbued in a caregiving object as straightforward as the Kuddle-Up Blanket, a baby blanket first produced in the 1950s. Meanwhile, the art in the show is installed in direct proximity to these functional objects to support the idea of caretaking and reproductive experiences as analogous to craft and other creative disciplines. “They require so much time, labor, and practice,” says Darro of art making. “It’s not inherent knowledge. It’s passed between generations.”

Illuminating this relationship are two large-scale, horizontal acrylic paintings by Houston artist Francesca Fuchs of a breastfeeding baby hovering behind three small ceramic sculptures by another artist-mom, Madeline Donahue. Donahue’s two-piece sculpture Sphynx depicts the artist splayed out like a lioness atop one child, who suckles a pendulous breast, while the other holds herself a mid-backflip over mom’s butt. The three bodies are intertwined like a family circus act, though Donahue’s Zen-like countenance is inscrutable.

Throughout the exhibit, objects representing past eras of design, including a 70s-era Fisher-Price nursery monitor, a vintage glass Stork nursing bottle, and antiquated products created to aid with menstruation, fertility, and pregnancy, engage in an unspoken dialogue with such dramatic standalone works as Aimee Koran’s blood-red chrome-plated breast pump and Kim Harty’s blown and cut glass uterine sculptures. Other thoughtfully curated combinations of craft, design, and art objects address miscarriage, abortion access, and disaster preparedness for parents.

One of the many admirable things about Designing Motherhood is its commitment to promoting a deeper knowledge of the arc of human reproduction through the power of art. “Parenthood and motherhood is like any other skilled discipline,” says Darro. “It’s a mistake to think it’s an inherent knowledge we all carry inside.” In the last gallery of the exhibit, Liss LaFleur and Katherine Sobering’s neon and fringe installation, Queer Birth Project, glows like an empty disco, illuminating a space for visitors to sit with what they’ve seen, and consider the role caregiving plays in our existence as a communal species.

This year, the application opens one month earlier than previous years, on December 1, 2024, and closes February 1, 2025.

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