The Let Down Reflex

The Let Down Reflex (LDR) is an ongoing research project, co-organized by Amber Berson and Juliana Driever, that proudly advocates for artist-parents and caretakers, and their professional participation in the art world. Spanning ten years of research, artmaking, conversations, friendship, and creative connection, LDR creates a radical presence for families in spaces where they are typically absent, centering advocacy and caretaking in its organization and conceptual framework. 

Ten years after its inaugural iteration, this exhibition returns to the questions/gestures The Let Down Reflex first opened, creating space to discuss shifting needs and desires not only among parents, but with the broader non-parenting public, building shared understanding of the challenges facing artist-parents. Named for the involuntary reflex that causes nursing parents to produce breast milk, The Let Down Reflex takes on a double meaning, referring to the reflexive tendency of letting down parents, and particularly mothers, within the flawed labour system of the art world.

When we first began this curatorial partnership over a decade ago, our children were either very young or actual babies. Now, one is off to college, and another is starting high school. Our families, too, have changed shape, and we have re-negotiated and expanded our ideas around care and shared responsibility toward children, parents, and ourselves. This anniversary is an occasion to look back on our labour of love, which has had serious resonance for ourselves, our parenting, our relationships, and for the artists in our lives. We take stock of the progress made and the challenges ahead, and continue to open discursive space for thinking together about more ideal futures

While over the past decade there have been many gains for parenting artists and accessibility to art world opportunities, we have observed a two steps forward, two steps back conundrum in which a slippage occurs, and momentum is lost. We wrote a grant for this exhibition without immediately considering whether childcare was necessary, likely (and admittedly) because it was no longer top-of-mind as our own kids no longer need this support. If we, as researchers committed to accessibility for families, could so easily forget, then it means these conversations need to happen regularly and with a renewed chorus of voices that highlight new and emergent needs.

We are programming this show post-pandemic and in a dramatically shifted geopolitical landscape. The pandemic forced the delicate balance of filial responsibility with work/life to the forefront. In the United States, the 2022 overturning of Roe vs. Wade, which had guaranteed a federal constitutional right to an abortion, has led to increasingly Orwellian conditions for birthing people. Whereas we saw an increase in support with exhibition, residency, and grant opportunities for parent-artists following the initial iteration of The Let Down Reflex in 2016, we have also observed that the artworld is a system that follows economic motivations—often led by collectors and dealers—moving on toward other issues it deems de rigueur. Its players, however, unless they are recipients of some (financial, familial, cultural) privilege,——are still often left to independently improvise solutions for participation. 

Advocacy for care-takers is the conceptual core of this project, and like all community-based work, we’ve seen that ongoing commitment is needed to reshape institutional frameworks and norms. For us, some of the most generative parts of organizing have been in the mundane details: figuring out ways to navigate insurance policies, finding grantmakers open to funding babysitting, thinking about where to park strollers, or where a breastfeeding mother might sit for a quiet moment to feed her child. We have seen these efforts as acts of curatorial care, supporting a vision for a creative culture that considers the needs of diverse participants and encourages authenticity.

This iteration of The Let Down Reflex includes work by ten international artists and thinkers. Home Affairs disrupts conventional representations of motherhood, capturing the challenges mothers face as cultural producers. Jacqueline Hoàng Nguyên explores historic precedents of feminist calls to action. Leisure (Meredith Carruthers & Susannah Wesley) invites children in as collaborators. Lise Haller Baggesen locates “the mother-shaped hole in contemporary art discourse.” LoVid’s video is a love letter to those who made being an artist-parent possible. Dillon de Give, with performers Ansona, Claire, Magdalena, Chloe, and Maria, presents theatrical versions of their families’ bedtime struggles and routines. Rachel Kauder Nalebuff’s play—produced with Caitlin O’Connell and featuring Luiza Dale, Hope Kronman, and Emma Zakes Green—explores intergenerational inheritance and the possibility of connection between strangers. Finally, artists and writers Shani K. Parsons and Kerri-Lynn Reeves contribute a small zine with original texts reflecting on the LDR’s collective history.

As we close in on ten years of collaboratively thinking through parenting and access in the arts, we are thrilled to share space with voices new to us. This anniversary is not the ending of our relationship to this project, but an insistence that the echo of its influence and rich subject matter remains not only relevant, but urgent. Our needs expressed in this exhibition are not enough to build the just, flourishing community for artists we would love to see: it requires your engagement and that of many, many others. The Let Down Reflex is an invitation to evolve the discussion, deepen our commitments, and uplift care and expansive thinking in our art world.

- Amber Berson and Juliana Driever