55.

HAVING A FAMILY IS FINE

There’s an unwritten rule—especially for women in the art world—that having children is “bad for your career.” This is idiotic. Or growing more so by the day.

Probably 90 percent of all artists have had children. These artists have mostly been men, and it wasn’t bad for their careers. Of course, for centuries women were tasked almost exclusively with domesticity and child-rearing, excluded from schools and academies, not even allowed to draw the nude from life, let alone apprentice to or learn from other artists. Tragically, this means that for thousands of years, art has been telling us far less than half the story. In many parts of the world this is changing. My hope is that mothers—as well as other women artists, artists of color, all those often excluded from the main stage—will soon be able to achieve careers as major as those of the decades of undeserving mediocre men before them who used white male privilege as a golden staircase.

Having children is not “bad” for your career. It does usually mean having less time or money or space. Dividing your attention among work, family, and career, while negotiating the dangerous straits of other people’s biases, is no walk in the park. But legions of women artists do this now; legions more will in the future, as these archaic prejudices erode.

The artist Laurel Nakadate points out that being a parent is already very much like being an artist. It means always lugging things around, living in chaos, doing things that are mysterious or impossible or scary. As with art, children can drive you crazy all day, make you yearn for some peace and quiet. Then in a single second, at any point, you are redeemed with a moment of intense, transformative love. “Being a mother-artist leaves no casual time. Mother-artists learn to use both hands, stay up all night comforting humans who think the world is ending, become experts at cleaning up blood and vomit and shit in darkness, and then, they go to work with the civilians. They put on clothes, they take phone calls, give talks, plan schedules, explain themselves, they go into professional meetings having survived emotional and physical upheaval. All this makes them better artists.” It’s also clarifying: “When my son was born, it became quite clear to me who still took me seriously as an artist, and who assumed that, because a human came out through my vagina, I could no longer use my brain.”

But the biggest reward may be that artists’ kids tend to have amazingly diverse, wonderful lives. “My son has been to every museum in New York City,” Nakadate says, “and believes that making things is what everyone does. He likes to paint in the middle of the night, he has a studio practice. . . . He talks about reflections on surfaces and what shape feelings become.” When she wrote this, her son was only two years old! Can I get an amen?

In work like S. with Child (1995), Gerhard Richter displays a deep engagement with his family (shown here in a photograph by Thomas Struth).