Ruth Asawa and the Artist-Mother at Midcentury

How a group of artist-mothers in postwar San Francisco refused the centuries-old belief that a woman could not make art while also raising children. For most of modern history, to be an artist and a mother was to embody a contradiction in terms. This “awful dichotomy,” as painter Alice Neel put it, pitted artmaking against caretaking and argued that the best art was made at the expense of family and futurity. But in San Francisco in the 1950s and 1960s, a group of artists gathered around Ruth As