Designing Motherhood: Michelle Millar Fisher in Conversation with Jiabao Li

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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…