The Design of Motherhood: MAD’s Exhibition is Personal and Profound

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A friend of mine, a Catholic priest, says that everyone cries at weddings, but each for their own reason. Some are thinking of their own happy marriage and feeling nostalgic for their own wedding day; some are remembering their beloved departed spouse with a mix of joy and grief; some feel regret, or hope, or longing for partnership. All these feelings, he says, are honored when we gather to bless and celebrate the new couple.

The Museum of Art and Design’s exhibition “Designing Motherhood: Things that Make and Break our Births”^[1] has this same quality. It is an examination of fertility and parenthood writ large and small, with a panoply of objects including manufactured mass-market items, medical devices and tools, design descriptions and notes, and related archival letters and video. Its relationship to the viewer is inevitably highly personal, and for many, likely to be highly emotional.

My husband and I came to it as the parents of two grown-and-flown children. As Curator Elizabeth Koehn showed us around, my husband and I exclaimed and laughed and groaned over our memories of our children’s babyhoods.^[2]

Many of the objects are so mundane and so personal it takes a moment to register them as historical and social things, designed with purpose and impact. The hospital baby blanket, with its aqua blue and magenta stripes, stopped me short. “Oh my goodness, that’s familiar! But it looks like they started printing the colors darker.” My husband shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.” And then I realized that the old blankets we have somewhere in a box have stripes of lighter blue and paler pink because we washed them hundreds of times during our two children’s babyhoods.

I felt those years in my bones, and then I saw more in the blankets: they are almost exactly the trans flag. These blankets were designed to be universal, for the two kinds of possible babies, male and female. But just a few years before my older child’s birth, transgender activist Monica Helms used similar stripes of color to create the trans flag. In hindsight, I had wrapped my two trans daughters in blankets just right for them. Design, instantiated in standardized and widely-distributed objects, can reify social arrangements and meanings. But it can also be appropriated to symbolically destabilize the very arrangements the objects were designed to represent.

Designing Motherhood contains more than 250 objects, and each one has the potential to be meditated upon in this way. “Motherhood” is defined capaciously, not limited to one sex or gender or to biological childbearing. The exhibit is also about choosing to delay or forgo parenthood. Like my friend the priest, it sensitively acknowledges a multitude of relationships to fertility, birthing, and parenting.

As a historian, I appreciated the well-chosen older objects on display. A large screen on one wall showed clips of All My Babies, a 1952 film made as an educational tool for Black lay midwives in Georgia. It features midwife Mary Coley, and her voice reverberates through the exhibit.

Medical devices are plentiful, including a display of 17 pessaries from the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, and another case with 12 IUDs. As I was walking through the medical devices, I exclaimed, “Oh wow, look, the Del Em!” This device made from a pump, tubes, and a canning jar was created as a lay-operated suction “menstrual extraction” tool at the feminist Los Angeles Self-Help clinic in 1971, two years before the Roe v. Wade decision. I had only seen pictures of it in books, but it was immediately recognizable. It is a potent symbol in a moment when abortion self-help has again become important, as recognized in the Mifepristone (a prescription abortifacient) also on display.

A number of displayed items relate to postpartum recovery. I was especially struck by the proxSIMity perineal repair simulators designed for obstetricians and midwives to practice stitching episiotomies and pelvic floor tears. It was hard not to cringe, looking at them, but they were one of many examples in the exhibit of objects created to improve the health and lives of birthing people. The designer of these models, Dr. Adam Dubrowski, made his designs available open-source, so they can be downloaded for free and 3D printed as a teaching tool for obstetricians and midwives here and abroad.

A significant chunk of the exhibition is dedicated to the culture of consumption around babies, or as the exhibition catalog describes it, “the baby-gear industrial complex.” I remember feeling overwhelmed by all the stuff I was supposed to understand and purchase when I had my first child. Looking back at all of it by way of the exhibition, I am not surprised.

This section of the exhibition included a whole wall of strollers. Several are expensive models that were popular when I had my first child in Berkeley in the early 2000s. I recall the smug satisfaction of realizing that my basic Graco, a workhorse of a modestly-priced stroller, had key features those fancy strollers were missing: a big enough basket to hold a diaper bag, sand toys, lunch, and library books, and two cupholders for the adult, one for coffee and one for water. That stroller was designed for my comfort and helped me do my job. One display stroller really caught my eye, though. High fashion designer Jeremy Scott created a fanciful, beautiful carriage that looked like a bright turquoise and silver 1950s car with tailfins. Not so practical, probably, and definitely not affordable, but the audacity of it sure would make me smile!

The Designing Motherhood exhibition is well worth seeing in its entirety. Viewers will identify with some parts of it, and be surprised by others, depending on their personal experience. Tying the whole thing together is a focus on the designs that respond to and shape the experiences of managing fertility, living as a pregnant person, birthing or supporting birth, and caring for infants. In a world where fertile, pregnant, and birthing people’s needs are usually expected to revolve around the “real person” – the baby – this exhibit puts the mother figure, and the designed objects that shape her life, at the center.

Notes

1. At the Museum of Art and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, New York City, through March 15, 2026. ↑
2. I served as an advisor on the New York installation of the exhibition. An interdisciplinary group of advisors met with Museum of Art and Design exhibit curators in a 2-hour group meeting, to give feedback on proposed themes and objects, suggestions for additional themes and objects, and interpretive context for this New York City iteration of the exhibition (first shown in 2021). Advisors were compensated for our time. This essay is a personal reflection on my experience of the exhibit. A review of the New York City exhibition can be found here; the original version of the exhibit at the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia is reviewed here and here. ↑

 

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Featured image caption: Museum of Art and Design Designing Motherhood exibit. (Installation Photo credit: Jenna Bascom/nyceventphotography courtesy of Museum of Arts and Design)