Growling or Silence, Please
Artists and mothers, choreographers and third-graders, influencers and daisy chains
Last week’s David Hockney post was a real rabbithole as I started reading further and further into all of the relationships and practices in his double portraits. There is so much there, down that rabbithole, and I think that’s evidence of the rewards that come with close attention to just about anything, to fixing the gaze and agreeing to look past the point when the looking becomes boring and uncomfortable. What I had originally intended to be a quick biographical note attached to seven images became a much more sympathetic bit of time spent with a rich network of affiliations and alliances. So this week I want to spend a few minutes doing just the opposite: catching up on a very brief, very fragmented tour of projects that I’ve seen friends post or heard friends mention over the course of the fall season.
Also a note to say that I’ve shuttered the Nostos Instagram account. I don’t enjoy spending any more time on Instagram than I already do and have no interest in managing a second channel. You can still follow me on my personal account robinpeckham, where I very occasionally post excerpts from Nostos and announce new editions of the newsletter on Stories, but also mostly write about other art things that I’m seeing or working on.
Link: Lola Clark on Ocula
As fate would have it, we have to start our catch-up week back with David Hockney again, because Ocula just ran this quirky photo shoot with the influencer Lola Clark, granddaughter of Ossie and Celia, who has herself now sat for David twice.
Field Trip: Linda Fregni Nagler at Galleria d’Arte Moderne Torino
Linda is the artist behind an incredible trove of “hidden mother” photographs, a genre of early portrait photography in which mothers would hide beneath sheets of cloth and other devices to keep their babies posed for the camera. She did a book of these images with MACK that is now more than ten years old. I’m hearing great things about the whole exhibition, which looks at her conceptual approach to the photographic archive.
Icon: Amanda Ross-Ho
Amanda’s instantly iconic Untitled Thresholds (FOUR SEASONS) (2025) is featured in the Hammer’s biennial exhibition “Made in LA,” which is on until March. She has recreated at larger than life size the door to her father’s nursing home room, then decorated them with the banal seasonal decorations endemic to institutional settings. Although there are four doors, suggesting a cycle of four seasons, the decorations are all out of order: a skeleton hangs over a sparkling Happy New Year banner, an Easter bunny sat to one side. I find this work dripping in the pathos of the passage of time on multiple scales.
Field Trip: “Designing Motherhood” at MAD New York
“Designing Motherhood” is one of the best exhibitions ever, full stop. It already has a beautiful book and now its tour has landed it in New York. Working across art, design, and advocacy, the curators have collected an extraordinary series of objects and concepts, a treasure trove of motherhood as generative drive and social product.
Link: The Inaugural Artists & Mothers Gala in Vogue
Artists & Mothers is an amazing American nonprofit that advocates for the inclusion of artist-mothers in the art world. They hosted their first-ever gala at the WSA a couple weeks ago, hosted during the family-friendly hours of 3-6 in the afternoon with children in attendance, and Vogue has the pictures.
More importantly, their 2026 grants are open for application until 2 January. The aim is “supporting artists who identify as mothers at an inflection point in their careers. Eligible to New York City-based artists with children under the age of three, awardees will receive a grant for $25,000 to be used for childcare expenses with the provider of their choice.” Amazing program, application online here.
Field Trip: “After School” at the Carnegie in Pittsburgh
The Heinz Architectural Center at the Carnegie Museum of Art convenes architects, artists, and educators to look at the built environment of public education, including a bit on playgrounds among other topics. I have never been to Pittsburgh and find a trip unlikely so I am looking forward to seeing the catalogue for this one.
Field Trip: Amalia Pica at Cample Line in Scotland
Amalia is an artist who draws on her experiences with children—her own and others—in a straightforward way without making this a thematic element of the way her practice is framed. As she frames it in this exhibition: “I am someone who works from the world. I don’t make worlds myself. I’m constantly looking around and finding or drawing on things.” Her “Keepsake” series of embroideries are based on the intuitive abstractions her son drew before he was able to think in terms of “pictures.” It reminds me of how Oscar Murillo uses kids’ scratches on school desks to tap into the global unconscious. Amalia has also included a pressed daisy chain of epic scale that really ties the room together. There is a great interview on Studio International.
Field Trip: Show & Tell at the Walker in Minneapolis
It’s another “Exhibition for Kids”! This one is genuinely for kids, not “curated as if,” which makes it a bit surprising that it’s a fall exhibition rather than a summer holiday show, though it’s on through spring so I guess they’ll get the winter holiday visitation. It’s largely a different set of artists than the one we’ve become accustomed to, with an American pop slant in Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, and Jeffrey Gibson. Halfway between an exhibition of contemporary art accessible to young audiences and an educational interpretive display about contemporary art, the exhibition design does a lot of the heavy lifting. I like the idea of a wall designed with apses and niches for encounters with works of art.
Link: The internet is dying on the outside but growing on the inside on Metalabel
Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest Collective has been gradually advancing this theory that, with the internet either falling apart or being encrusted in a layer of slop, all of the interesting conversations are moving into walled gardens marked by internal trust and external exclusion. They’re developing a project called Dark Forest OS that will eventually be shared for external use. I wonder if there are interesting applications to creative parent groups.
Book Report: The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book in Vittles
Francesca Wade, author of the new Gertrude Stein biography, shares how the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book and Alice’s cooking in general fit alongside the creative practice that was Gertrude Stein’s home and studio.
On the subject of Vittles, I’m not sure I ever shared their wonderful six-part kids supplement on food and children.
Projections: “Children’s Ways of Knowing” at the New School
Excellent screening program at the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics that acknowledges how “children demonstrate forms of intelligence rooted in embodied experience and collaborative practice, ways of knowing that challenge what typically counts as intelligence.” Aside from Tiffany Sia’s A Child Already Knows, which wonders how aware a child might be of the political winds that buffet everyday life, it also included Aslı Baykal’s project on film photography workshops in conflict zones and Adelita Husni Bey’s Postcards from the Desert Island, a sympathetic retelling of Lord of the Flies, but radically aspirational.
Link: How overfunctioning keeps mothers trapped at home in Mad Woman
Amazing essay by the writer Amanda Montei on the relationship between motherhood and creative practice. “Within the institution of motherhood … sacrificial overfunctioning is praised as the minimum requirement for goodness.” And:
We tend to think women are only worthy of creativity, of that extreme act, and frankly of having public lives, when they have shown themselves to be very very good in other more traditionally feminine areas.
Projections: Artists in Residence at IFC
Amazing film written and directed by Katie Jacobs that just premiered at the DOC NYC film festival. Katie interviews Lois Dodd, Eleanor Magid, and Louise Kruger, who built a home together as single mothers and built incredible careers. She also interviews their children! It is super moving, a witness to the hope and perseverance that builds the kinds of creative lives that would seem doomed to impossibility from the outside. Best of all, before 30 November you can pay USD 15 to stream the film online as part of the festival.
Link: For the Children of Performa, the Sound of Art is a Buzz and a Growl in the New York Times
Lina Lapelyte, who wrote the incredible opera Sun & Sea, is participating in Performa this year with a piece of choreography that involves 230 third- and fourth-grade children. I haven’t seen much from the performance itself, but Will Henrich’s notes from his visit to the rehearsals is a great read:
“There are ways of creating a setup where nothing is a mistake,” Lapelyte explained. By building in improvisation and making the subversion of expectations the work’s very subject, Lapelyte ensures that she can declare whatever happens a success. Another key ingredient is to be very clear about the instructions you do give, Lapelyte said. At one point, reprimanding a group of boys who’d started chatting instead of practicing animal noises, Cooke told them sternly, “Growling or silence, please.”
We’re adding that to our list of new mottos here at Nostos. Growling or silence, please!