Viewpoint: Angela Strassheim
We asked photographer Angela Strassheim to share with us this Mother's Day her thoughts on motherhood and what is has been like for her during the COVID19 crisis as a working mother. Strassheim's photo Janine Eight Months Pregnant caused quite a stir here in Jacksonville in 2014. During her Project Atrium exhibition, a Jacksonville city councilman likened the portrait to pornography trigging local and national public outrage. Strassheim offers here her thoughts on the fortifying support created by that experience and what it means to support each other in these troubled times.
Never before the actual experience of motherhood could I have imagined exactly what it would feel like and how my life would change. My children have coaxed, teased, yanked and cuddled new parts of me out of my old self. Contending with all of the new challenges that they presented became the new normal and so my work, always about the domestic sphere, took on a decidedly maternal point of view. Lucian and Katherine, the centerpiece of the MOCA Jacksonville Project Atrium exhibition was actually made long before I became a mother, but I had never really embraced it until the exhibition. It was the first time I had ever exhibited it, and the Project Atrium exhibition was a new chapter in my work.
In November 2014, amidst claims that the Janine Eight Months Pregnant photograph from the show, a reclining nude on a couch, was pornography, I was reminded that even in its totally natural state of bearing life, a woman's body is a constant battleground. When #istandwithmoca bravely responded to denounce those claims, I felt galvanized with the people of Jacksonville and proud to take that stand with them.
ANGELA STRASSHEIM, Untitled (Lucian and Katherine), 2005. Archival pigment print, ed. 2/5, 40 x 50 inches. Museum purchase, Acquisition Fund and contributions from the Collector's Circle. © Angela Strassheim. Used by permission.
