About

Welcome to Motherland! You may have recently washed up on its shores, or have been living here for a while and already acclimated, the blur of the early years of motherhood behind you. Or maybe you don’t live here, but you have a relationship to this place as a partner, child, or friend.

I started working on Greetings from Motherland in 2009, six months after my daughter was born. When I emerged from my post-partum haze, I realized that I couldn’t be the only one who felt so disoriented when I disembarked here. As a new mother and an artist, I felt troubled by the disconnection between some of the sentimental representations of motherhood and the reality, as well as the isolation and related pressure to be the mythical “perfect mother”, whatever that means.

Greetings from Motherland is a collective artistic exploration to remedy that.  Through this multi-disciplinary collaborative art project, I bring women together to question, investigate, share, and play using our real lives as mothers as the raw material, and to hopefully create some honest representations of motherhood in the process.

Together we create new works and add to them through workshops of varying lengths, and then present what we’ve created and invite participation from the community through traveling exhibitions, presentations, site-specific events and this web site.

Like motherhood, the project will evolve unpredictably. But what makes each possible—and worth the journey—is the community that surrounds and supports it.  Drop your bags and make yourself at home.

Mindy Stricke (Artistic Director)  is a photographer and community artist.  Her work involves multi-disciplinary collaborations and installations that challenge traditional boundaries between artists and non-artists, between artists and audience and between process and product.  In 2009, she launched Greetings From Motherland, a community art project that gathers women together to make art about motherhood through workshops and participatory events. Her portraits and other work have been exhibited throughout North America and are featured in international publications including the New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek and Voce and in the Smithsonian Institute Photography Initiative online exhibit Click! Photography Changes Everything.  Originally from New York, she now lives in Toronto with her husband David and daughter Noa.