Designing Motherhood: Michelle Millar Fisher in Conversation with Jiabao Li
Who designs motherhood? How do objects, medical systems, technologies, and cultural expectations shape our experiences of menstruation, pregnancy, birth, postpartum life, and care?
Presented in conjunction with Jiabao Li’s solo exhibition Womb Wetware, this hybrid event brings curator and design historian Michelle Millar Fisher into conversation with artist Jiabao Li.
Michelle Millar Fisher, Chief Curator at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, will give an illustrated introduction to Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births, the award-winning book and international touring exhibition examining human reproduction through the lens of design. Co-founded by Fisher and Amber Winick and developed with a collaborative curatorial team, the project traces more than 150 years of reproductive design through medical instruments, breast pumps, contraceptive devices, maternity clothing, baby monitors, contemporary artworks, speculative projects, and everyday objects. The exhibition has traveled from Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum to Boston, Seattle, Houston, Stockholm, and the Museum of Arts and Design in New York.
Fisher and Li will then connect Designing Motherhood with Womb Wetware, the current exhibition at tiat, created during pregnancy and after birth that approaches the reproductive body as ancient wetware: intelligent, leaky, erotic, and alive. Their conversation will consider how motherhood is designed, medicalized, represented, and regulated, as well as how artists and designers can make its invisible technologies, labor, pleasure, grief, and contradictions visible.
Michelle will join remotely. Jiabao will be at tiat Gallery. Audiences are invited to attend in person at tiat Gallery in San Francisco or online via Zoom.
Zoom link: https://northeastern.zoom.us/j/3608296627
Michelle Millar Fisher
Michelle Millar Fisher, PhD, is Chief Curator at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. She writes, lectures, and curates exhibitions about the intersections of people, power, and the material world, with particular interests in design, architecture, craft, and care work. Previously, she was the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. She is a co-founder of Designing Motherhood, an award-winning book, touring exhibition, curriculum, and public-program series.
Designing Motherhood
Michelle Millar Fisher at Cooper Hewitt
Jiabao Li
Jiabao Li is an artist, inventor, and Associate Professor at Northeastern University. Working across XR, AI, bio-art, performance, installation, and scientific experimentation, she explores more-than-human ecologies, feminist biotech, multispecies intelligence, and how technology reshapes perception. Her work has been exhibited internationally at venues including MoMA, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Ars Electronica, Exploratorium, and The Contemporary Austin. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Exploratorium and co-founder and Chief Design Officer of Endless Health.