Installation, Our Mothers Ourselves. Frederick Layton Gallery, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design Exhibition Dates October 10 through December 13, 2025

Across time, culture and class, the idea of the Mother has achieved the status of myth, yet it embodies countless contradictions. This most intimate relationship is ultimately unknowable. To consider ones maternal lineage and to depict familial roles and relationships is like documenting a hall of mirrors, reflections and distortions abound — ultimately the images reflect back upon oneself.

In their exhibition, Our Mothers Ourselves, currently on view at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, photographers Ellen Konar and Adrienne Defendi have selected ten additional artists to join them in expressing the intricacies and legacy of their matrilineal experiences. Articulated with compassion, complex emotional bonds are revealed through a wide variety of processes and practices. The exhibition conjures small worlds constructed from multiple layers in time.

In light of shifting definitions regarding the nature of family, sexuality and parenting, this timely presentation suggests strategies for how we might look deeper into our own familial narratives. Below, I asked the curators to discuss their motivation and experiences in gathering together the work of this contemplative exhibition.

Lindsay Lochman: How do you see the exhibition navigating the complexity of the mother/child relationship? Has your curatorial role and process revealed new things about your relationships with your own mothers and families?

Ellen Konar:  I once heard it said that our relationships with family members don’t end at death—they continue evolving through new phases. Exploring a family member’s story, through any medium, seems to intensify this evolution. Over the last year, I searched holocaust archives to understand my mother’s experiences, looking for what gave her the hope and strength she demonstrated. As a psychologist by education, I’m struck by how little we understand this resilience—how someone can witness humanity’s worst yet still live with love and generosity, and without consuming bitterness. Curating my fellow artists’ work has deepened this puzzle for me. It’s made me think more about this profound human capability and the legacy I want to leave behind.

Adrienne Defendi:  One of the most satisfying and interesting aspects of being involved as artist and curator was the privilege of sitting with the many series of works and delving into each conceptual articulation of a matrilineal legacy – so many facets and considerations, private and historical, social and communal. Bringing these works together in Our Mothers Ourselves broadened my understanding of what legacy or legacies can look like and how they can function to preserve and reinvent, revere and reflect our unique stories and commonalities.

Exhibition Artists’ Montage, Our Mothers Ourselves Installation

LL: What are the origins of the exhibition Our Mothers Ourselves? Where was your starting point, how did it evolve? Had you collaborated on other projects?

EK:  Adrienne and I were members of The Bay Area Photographers Collective (BAPC) and at one point co-chaired their exhibition committee. We developed an exhibit entitled Of Dreams and Reality, curated by Ann Jastrab, that included Adrienne’s poignant images of her mother during her final years. When San Francisco’s Harvey Milk Photo Center expressed an interest in an exhibit about mothers, those images came to mind. I began to imagine a show about mothers and their legacies, incorporating Adrienne’s series and my own nascent exploration about my immigrant mother. Together we worked on building out the initial concept of “Our Mothers Ourselves,” and set about incorporating a broad range of perspectives by involving additional artists whose maternal legacies and approaches to photography varied from our own.

AD:  I was thrilled when Ellen invited me to collaborate with her on the theme of maternal legacies back in 2022. Ellen and I have known each other for a long time and we knew our working styles and strengths were complementary. The opportunity to expand Our Mothers Ourselves for the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design gallery over the past year allowed for deeper and dynamic collaboration. At each pass in the selection, curation and most recently, installation, we brainstormed ideas back and forth with mutual respect and dedication.

LL:  Describe your criteria for choosing each artist’s work and what you feel each brought to the exhibition.

AD:  We identified artists whose work explored familial themes, and more specifically their maternal legacies. As we curated the artworks, we considered what each artist brought to the exhibition, aesthetically, culturally, and thematically. We also aimed to represent a variety of photographic bodies of work: two and three-dimensional, and installation. As the list of artists grew, it became more challenging yet increasingly satisfying to identify those with something unique to contribute to the exhibit. We happened to find two of our artists on Lenscratch!

EK: Our first iteration of the exhibit at Harvey Milk Photo Center in San Francisco features seven artists, in addition to ourselves, whose images and narratives were exceptionally strong and complementary.

© Jerry Takigawa, New Beginning, 2020; Installation from Balancing Cultures, 2016-2020

Jerry Takigawa’s series Balancing Cultures includes artfully designed collages of familial photographs with artifacts, documents, and memories that tell of his family’s journey from immigration to incarceration, re-integration, and re-assimilation during the intensely anti-Japanese period in the US during WWII. His work reflects the familial and strongly maternal legacy of “gaman,” endurance of hardship with dignity and patience. Jerry’s work is a timely reminder that silence can sanction injustice while documentation serves as resistance.

©Marsha Guggenheim, My Parents, 2021, Installation from Without a Map, 2017-2023

Marsha Guggenheim’s deeply personal, yet universal project Without a Map conveys her own pathfinding after her mother suddenly died when she was ten. Working with archival family photos, Marsha creates new images based on her memories and family artifacts, often turning the camera on herself. In the process, Marsha evokes, reinterprets, and addresses unanswered questions buried so many years ago. Her self portraits are remarkable juxtapositions of herself past and present, and seem to suggest a timeless alignment of confusion and clarity.

© Kathleen McDonald, Installation from Thread My Mother Gave Me, 2017-2015; Untitled 2 (from “Hazel”), 2025; Thread My Mother Gave Me Part II (Poem), 2025; Untitled 1 (from “Hazel”), 2025

Kathleen MacDonald, a West Indian multidisciplinary artist, uses Caribbean flora, mythology, and poetry to portray mother/daughter relationships, question relationships to past and place, and reclaim lost histories. Her central work in the show, Thread My Mother Gave Me, lovingly explores the multilayered, complex similarities and dichotomies between artist and mother in an eleven foot monumental tapestry. This work, in addition to two new photographs of her mother printed on silk created after her recent death, is a tribute to her mother’s legacies defined by time and tradition.

©Federica Amstrong, Installations from The Dowry, 2022-2025

Federica Armstrong, a visual artist born in Italy and based in Palo Alto, California, shares her work from The Dowry in which she transfers images from her family archive onto vintage textiles using a cyanotype process. With these textiles, Federica creates a striking installation for the show: a familial table setting and chandelier that reflect her family’s rich legacy, memory, connections, and implicit absences. Vintage family portraits “plate” the table, inviting the public to consider who sits at their own metaphorical gathering, graced by possibility in the gentle sway of the cyanotype handkerchiefs above.

©JP Terlizzi, Installations of Descendents and The Matriarch from Remembering Papa

Looking to include artists beyond California, we came across JP Terlizzi’s project, Descendants, constructions that convey physical and emotional connections between himself and his ancestors. For the MIAD exhibit, we were able to include his assemblages from Remembering Papa. In the threads of The Matriarch, JP represents the interweaving of family traditions, values and teachings, cocooning his grandmother’s portrait, a symbol of strength, devotion, and love of family. JP’s assemblage My Mother’s Song, placed at the entrance of the show, reflects a different maternal legacy – a legacy that bound, rather than enabled, a family’s happiness.

©Lianne Milton, Installation from Mother/Nai, 2018-2021

We identified Lianne Milton’s work from her Wisconsin exhibit entitled Mother/Nai, a project in which she explored autobiographical narratives of her family history, transgenerational memory, and the Chinese diaspora. In her photograph Matriline, images of her grandmother and mother are held in the artist’s raised hands, honoring three generations of matrilineal history, telling us not just what was, but also reflecting on the loss and the silence that arises from the pain and oppression as a part of her Chinese diasporic experience.

©Charlotte Niel, Installation from Forget Me Not, The Long Goodbye 2022-2024

Charlotte Niel began her project Forget Me Not as her mother descended into a world of debilitating dementia. For the 2025 MIAD exhibit, we focused on Charlotte’s most recent additions to her project: skillfully crafted and layered in form and concept. They feature selective stitching on silk images of her mother’s embroidery, atop photographs of her mother and those she loved, but ultimately could not recognize. Charlotte purposely allows the threads to twist, knot or come undone, paralleling her mother’s decline.

© Nic Umbs, Installation from Legacy, 2019-2025

EK: We were captivated by Nic Umbs’s project Memento Vitae in which he visually explores the fragility of memory and legacy through a dialogue between his family photo archives and photographs he made with his mother’s maternal grandfather’s 1917 Kodak camera. Restored just enough to function, the camera’s distortions parallel unresolved family dynamics while echoing the gaps in his inherited narratives. Nic also introduced us to Milwaukee-based artist, Allison Calteux.

©Allison Calteux, Installation from Remnants // Relics // Remembrance, 2022-2023

Allison Calteux’s series Remnants // Relics // Remembrance examines her family photo archive and her ancestral matriarchs in particular, paying homage to the women who are pictured, those whose belongings have been passed down, and those whose photographs are a part of the work. Her black and white and cyanotype images speak boldly of their legacy and her embrace of those gifts.  Her cyanotypes embedded in intricate heirloom doilies are pin-mounted and set off from the wall, creating intriguing shadows that add depth and dimension to the installation.

LL: As both visual artists and photographers, how did each of you begin your practice and when did it turn toward this subject matter.

EK: I’m a latecomer to photography, becoming a more active and committed photographer when a photo book-making class required a portfolio I didn’t yet have. I borrowed a camera, developed my first real project, and produced my first book about 15 years ago. Since then, I have collaborated with my partner, Steve Goldband, on a wide range of photographic projects inspired by shifting visual landscapes and community.

©Ellen Konar + Steve Goldband, From the Ghetto, 2025

We began By Her Hand when I rediscovered my mother’s fading peach-colored blouse during a pandemic closet purge. She had sewn this once stylish garment in 1945, with a remnant of charmeuse fabric she retrieved from her former home after barely surviving six years of forced labor, near-starvation and disease before her liberation from a Nazi concentration camp. I envisioned her wearing it or clutching it close as she escaped Poland and Germany, immigrated to the United States, and raised her own family in Milwaukee. Our initial photographs documented the blouse and its meticulous stitching as symbols of her courage and determination to construct a new future from the remnants of her past. We layered segments from the garment over archival photographs to suggest their potential to operate as a window or lens through which she and or we could view her life before and after liberation. This year, we incorporated newly discovered documents from her family in Radom to honor her resurgent legacy  — “by her hand.”

©Adrienne Defendi, My Mother’s Perfumes, 2012; Installation from Let the Cadence Fall, 2012-2025; L’instant magic, 2025

AD: Photographing for decades, my interests in longing and loss, death and transformation have informed my art practice and varied series. Specific to Our Mothers Ourselves, I had documented the home I grew up in on the east coast while witnessing the steady demise of my parents for over ten years. The images on exhibit, curated to feature my maternal legacy – her appreciation of poetry and haiku – manifest as framed photographs and an artist-made accordion book As the cadence falls. Newly created for the MIAD exhibit, I reconceived the early photographic image My Mother’s Perfumes by casting perfume bottles in pewter with image fragments affixed with beeswax. They perch, as they did long-ago on the window sill, now weighted like half-bodied urns, sentinels of loss and aromatic memory.

LL: Did the gallery space at The Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design present challenges or alter your thoughts about the exhibition?

EK: The gallery space presented interesting opportunities and challenges to rethink and reimagine aspects of Our Mothers Ourselves. With a larger space and a decidedly circular flow around a center wall which defined individual exhibition spaces, we were able to accommodate more artists with more diverse work to more fully represent the “legacies that shape us”.

AD: We were also able to create a montage of artists’ images(above), a unique feature of this exhibition. After considerable trial and error, we arranged the emblematic works across a long gallery wall with the framed images touching and installed at varied heights, like notes on a score, continuous but not always aligned.

EK: We carved out space within the exhibit to encourage the public to share their own reflections on legacies that shape us. Visitors consider and share their own maternal and familial legacies, and consider what legacies they want to leave behind. MIAD generously provided vintage typewriters with which the public could record their thoughts (a touch of curiosity for the younger visitors) and we created a “Legacy Wall” to post their responses and see those of others.  We have also provided a means for individuals to record a maternal/legacy name. Given the growing number of legacy notes on the wall and the additional audio collection of names, it’s evident that Milwaukeeans are actively engaging with the questions and are eager to reflect upon their own legacies (past, present and future).

Legacy Wall, Our Mothers Ourselves Installation, 2025

AD: In the mounting Our Mothers Ourselves, we were challenged to install very different bodies of work so their narratives and visual representations would both shine individually as well as collectively. This process was highly interactive, and required forethought, patience, audacity, playfulness, and compromise.  We believe we rallied and brought this and more to the gallery in the final installation process days before the opening, creating a powerful look at “our mothers ourselves.”

EK: Finally, we initiated a series of programs related to and in support of the exhibit. In October, Nic Umbs presented a photographic workshop: “What Was, What Is: A Portrait Experience”. A panel on the artist’s role and legacy, moderated by artist and educator, Kevin Miyazaki took place in November. Finally, we initiated and curated a parallel student exhibit of work by MIAD students: Student Perspectives on Legacies that Shape Us.   

 LL:  Do you have plans to expand this project? If so, how do you envision this exhibition might evolve in the future?

EK:  I am truly gratified to witness the evolution of this exhibit since just 2023, and the response of students and a younger generation to the questions raised. Yet, I have a sense that Our Mothers Ourselves is still in a formative stage. I, for one, have renewed energy to further extend the project to include an even broader array of photographic installations and the legacies we share.

Our Mothers Ourselves Catalog, 2025

Adrienne Defendi is a visual artist whose work explores the cyclical, the ephemeral, and the fragility of life. In her art practice, she charts elements of loss and ritual, and the boundless possibilities within reiteration and experimentation. Adrienne has exhibited her work extensively and enjoys curating, most recently the photo-based show Unmoored at Chung 24 Gallery. She is an artist-in-residence with the Cubberley Artist Studio Program in Palo Alto, CA.   Instagram: @adrienne_defendi

Ellen Konar is a photographic artist and curator often working in dynamic collaboration with her partner, Steve Goldband.  Based in the Bay Area, they draw much of their inspiration from nearby topography and industry, juxtaposing the intimate and the monumental. Drawing on their earlier careers in psychology and technology, and printing on Japanese papers, their work visualizes the ethereal, inviting viewers to heed the fragility and power that shape the future. They have exhibited widely, received a host of gallery and museum awards and were recently recognized among Photolucida’s 2025 Critical Mass Top 50.     Instagram: @ekonar