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

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...

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