Designing Motherhood is a first-of-its-kind consideration of the arc of human reproduction through the lens of design, and includes an award-winning book and an exhibition that was in two locations in Philadelphia (2021), Boston (2022), Seattle (2023), and Stockholm and Houston in 2024-2025.
The exhibition opened at its seventh venue, the Museum of Art and Design in New York City, in fall 2025 and will be on view there until March 15, 2026.
Scroll down to learn more about our project!
Recent Press
Dezeen, Five Highlights from Designing Motherhood
WNYC, How Design has Shaped Motherhood and Reproductive Health
Financial Times, How design has changed motherhood
Glasstire, Design and Motherhood
Design Miami, A Bunch of MOTHERS!
The New York Times, Menstrual Cups in Museums? It’s Time.
The Guardian, Designing Motherhood: project puts objects shaped by maternity in focus
Vogue, A New Exhibition in Philadelphia Examines the Hidden Histories of Reproduction
The Washington Post, The Lily, Forceps, breast pumps, IUDs: This exhibit puts motherhood on display
Smithsonian Magazine,Designing Motherhood
The National, Scotland’s baby box to go on display in American Designing Motherhood exhibition
Artdaily, Designing Motherhood exhibition opens at the Mütter Museum
Monopol, Geburt und Gegenstände Wie Mutterschaft designt wird
The Boston Globe, The ‘hidden mothers’ in old photographs
Nursing Clio, Reproductive Designs and the Stories Behind Them: A Review of Designing Motherhood
About
It’s a book.
Out now! From MIT Press!It’s an exhibition.
Open now at the Museum of Art and Design in New York until March 15, 2026.
The DM exhibition was concurrently at the Mütter Museum from May 2021 through May 2022 and the Center for Architecture and Design in Philadelphia from September 10-November 14, 2021; it then had a great six month run in Boston at the MassArt Art Museum (MAAM) from June - December, 2022 before heading to the The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Discovery Center in Seattle, WA in 2023. Aftee that, it headed to the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft from mid-October 2024 thorugh mid-March 2025 and was In Stockholm at ArkDes, the national museum of architecture and design, from September 2024 through the end of August 2025.
It’s a series of public programs.
We kicked off at Design Philadelphia in October 2020 and had a great culminating program at Design Philly in October 2021. The project has continued to generate public dialogue in all of its subsequent venues. It’s a design curriculum.
We partnered with Penn Design to bring curriculum conversations about the arc of human reproduction to design studios and design history classrooms. Get in touch if you’d like us to join yoursIt’s a set of Narrative Portraits
The partnership between Designing Motherhood and our foundational thought partners, Philly’s Maternity Care Coalition, is strengthened by sharing and listening to each other's stories. The DM x MCC Narative Portraits project is an equity centered and community design approach to advocate for a future where caregivers can birth with dignity, parent with autonomy, and raise babies who are healthy, growing, and thriving.
It’s an Instagram account.
This is where our research started and where we share snippets of wisdom as we find themMost of all, it’s a collaboration. Designing Motherhood has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage and the Graham Foundation, as well as a Sachs Program for Arts Innovation grant. Learn more about our amazing funders, thought leaders Maternity Care Coalition, and our other partners, including Boston’s Neighborhood Birth Center.
People
Juliana Rowen Barton, PhD is a curator and cultural organizer based in Providence, RI. Through her research and projects, she explores the confluence of race, gender, and design and invests in community-engaged creative practices. Currently, she is the Director of the Center for the Arts at Northeastern University, where she facilitates interdisciplinary arts programming and oversees the University's contemporary art space, Gallery 360. Throughout her career, Barton has worked on exhibitions and programs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, ArkDes, Center for Craft, Fralin Museum of Art, Center for Architecture, and Museum of Modern Art, among others. She comes from a family of architects and spends her free time in the pottery studio and the kitchen. See more here.
Originally hailing from Scotland, Michelle Millar Fisher, PhD writes, lectures, and creates exhibitions about the intersections of people, power, and the material world. She's currently a museum curator in Boston and has worked in cultural institutions for two decades including at MoMA, the Guggenheim, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. She has a particular interest in design, architecture, and craft, ranging from material-specific making and craft pedagogy to the craft of care work. See more here.
Zoë Greggs is a Black, lesbian, nonbinary Philadelphia-based artist and non-profit administrator who serves as the Development Manager at BlackStar Projects. Before joining BlackStar, they held positions at The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia’s African American Museum and the Magic Gardens. In 2024, Greggs received an Art and Change Grant award from the Leeway Foundation. Greggs was also the Curatorial Assistant for Designing Motherhood, where they brought their expertise in community engagement, project management, and art history. In addition, they co-led the Designing Motherhood Narrative Portrait project, which utilized the power of storytelling to advocate for a future where caregivers can birth with dignity and raise babies who are healthy, growing, and thriving. Through their passion for Black feminism, critical race theory, and systems change, they strive to create processes and joyful relationships that uproot systemic harm and shift mainstream narratives about our shared history and trajectory.
Amber Winick's professional practice centers around design, birth, and child development. As a writer, an independent design historian, coach and group facilitator, she is committed to cultivating slower, more conscious communities of care. Amber works hand-in-hand with parents, young children and designers alike to facilitate ease, confidence and a greater sense of purpose and pleasure. She’s also a mother of three, a New Yorker living in London, co-housing enthusiast, crafts novice, avid thrifter and nature lover. See more here.
Advisors
The Designing Motherhood advisory team was active during the initial exhibition phase in Philadelphia from 2019-2021 and comprised of Maternity Care Coalition staff with deep on-the-ground expertise in culturally-appropriate care work, maternal health, policy advocacy, and early childhood development. They were reproductive justice advocate, birth worker and program associate for MCC’s community doula and breastfeeding programs, Tekara Gainey; early childhood education expert and author Sabrina Taylor; and doula and lactation specialist Porsche M. Holland; associate director of policy and urban planner Gabriella Nelson (Gabriella went on to become part of the curatorial team); and culturally appropriate care specialist Adrianne Edwards. After Philadelphia, each venue has convened its own local advisory group to adapt the exhibition for their specific context.
Collaborators
Maternity Care Coalition
Since 1980, Maternity Care Coalition has assisted families throughout Southeastern Pennsylvania, focusing particularly on neighborhoods with high rates of poverty, infant mortality, health disparities, and changing immigration patterns. They know a family’s needs change as they go through the pregnancy and their child’s first years and they offer a range of services and programs for every step along the way. MCC envisions an equitable future where all families are healthy and connected, with all children thriving and ready to learn.
Neighborhood Birth Center
In Boston, the project’s thought partner was the Neighborhood Birth Center (NBC) which will open as Boston’s first independent and freestanding birth center in 2024 with the vision of improving birth experiences and outcomes, across communities, for generations.
Center for Architecture and Design
The Center provides Philadelphia with educational programs, exhibitions, and a public forum to explore architecture, urban planning, and design, allowing visitors the opportunity to understand how these disciplines affect us all in our daily lives.
Mütter Museum
America’s finest museum of medical history, the Mütter Museum helps the public understand the mysteries and beauty of the human body and to appreciate the history of diagnosis and treatment of disease.
Orkan Telhan and Penn Design
Orkan Telhan is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and researcher. Telhan is Associate Professor of Fine Arts, Emerging Design Practices in the School of Design at The University of Pennsylvania.
Romy St. Hilaire
Romy St. Hilaire is an arts and non profit consultant who previously served as the STEAM Team Program Coordinator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Romy is the founder of Art in the Antilles which supports Afro-Caribbean communities to equitably navigate the creative economy. She is currently a Masters candidate in the City Planning program at MIT focusing on International Development.
Maternity Care Coalition
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Designing Motherhood
Narrative Portraits
The future of motherhood is communal and is strengthened by sharing and listening to each other's stories. The Narrative Portrait partnership between Designing Motherhood and Maternity Care Coalition embraces an equity centered and community design approach to advocate for a future where caregivers can birth with dignity, parent with autonomy, and raise babies who are healthy, growing, and thriving.
For the last year, MCC staffers and DM curators Zoë Greggs and Gabriella Nelson have visited with the direct service staff--doulas, lactation consultants, early childhood and culturally-appropriate care experts--who are the beating heart and soul of Maternity Care Coalition’s daily work to protect the lives and health of birthing people and their infants.
Their hope was to shine a light on the hard and usually hidden work direct service staff do to care for people on a daily basis. To do that, they listened to their stories.
The project takes inspiration from legendary specultive Afrofuturist, Octavia E. Butler, particularly The Parable of the Sower (1983), and the images in the episodes come, in the main, from MCC’s archives stretching back to the early 1980s. The series includes three episodes which will be released gradually in the winter of 2021-22.
This is work that is underpaid and under-appreciated (if you’re a carer, too, you know). It deserves attention--and concrete support. Care work is some of the most important work done in society and all of us benefit from it in our own lives in one way or another.
Directed by: Zoë Greggs and Gabriella Nelson
Featuring storytellers: Rachel Blanchfeld, Adrianne Edwards, Tekara Gainey, Porsche Holland, Shayron Jarmon, Julia Lewis, April McNeal, Jamiylah Miller, Gabriella Nelson, Rasheedah Phillips, Karen Pollack, Marissa Regii, Sabrina Taylor
Images: From the Maternity Care Coalition archives held at the University of Pennsylvania Kislak Library; and other licensed images
Edited by: Austin Fisher
Music: Austin Fisher
Oral History Practices Research: Romy St. Hilaire
Rights to these stories are held by the storytellers themselves.
The storytellers are direct service staff at MCC and they shared their experiences as a way to highlight labor that often goes unseen and underpaid. Each storyteller was in control of how their narrative was presented here, but future audiences for their narratives may be far wider than we or they ever imagined. When you listen to their experiences, consider your own relationship to what they shared, and how you value their labor and how you participate in the social systems that determine how we care for those who do care work.
We invite you to watch, and then act: talk about the value of care work in public, with your family, and with your elected representatives (especially if you are a carer, because people need to hear your stories!). Bringing care work to greater attention wil hopefully help shift the needle towards (much) better support for care workers.
Some resources that might be helpful include MCC’s donation page, how to Get Involved with the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the resources that Paid Leave US has gathered, and the work of the Afiya Center and Indigenous Women Rising.
Research & Happenings
Book Launch: Designing Motherhood / Tufts University Art Galleries
#publicprogramsBook Launch: Designing Motherhood from Tufts University Art Galleries on Vimeo.
A conversation on the book with reproductive justice advocate and birth worker Tekara Gainey, artist Carmen Winant, and Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick.