MATERNITY LEAVE: NONE OF WOMEN BORN

Ángeles Agrela / Isabelle Albuquerque / Dominique Fung / Vivian Greven / Joshua Hagler / Loie Hollowell / Devin B. Johnson / Sung Hwa Kim / Alicja Kwade / Tali Lennox / Jessie Makinson / Tania Marmolejo / Nicolette Mishkan / Wangechi Mutu / Alice Neel / Lucy McRae / Agnieszka Nienartowicz / Christian Ruiz Berman / Kathy Ruttenberg / Nadia Waheed / Ambera Wellmann

After so much time spent in painful labor, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires was the most gratifying consummation of my toils.
— Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus, 1818, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
 
Advances in technology and genetic engineering have made inevitable a future in which the conception, gestation, and birth of human life will be subcontracted away from actual humans. MATERNITY LEAVE: NONE OF WOMEN BORN questions what it means to be of women born, when life actually begins, and explores structures that might assume the role of “mother” as society progresses.