On Trying to Create Art When the Baby’s Crying

While still a student in the late 1960s, the artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, pregnant with her first child, encountered a famous sculptor. She recalls him declaring, upon seeing her round belly, “Well, I guess now you can’t be an artist.” He wasn’t, she later realized, entirely wrong; once she had a baby, Ukeles found herself trapped in the kind of mindless automated work that defines early motherhood—bottle, diaper, rock, repeat. “I literally was divided in two,” she later said. “Half of my week I was the mother, and the other half the artist. But, I thought to myself, ‘This is ridiculous; I am the one.’”

It’s creation that gets the glory, she proclaimed in a manifesto, even though maintenance “takes all the fucking time.” In an exhibition she proposed, she’d perform her domestic work in museums—cooking, cleaning up,