Designing Women III: MOTHER Opens at Egg Collective’s Tribeca Gallery
May 4, 2021
According to the National Women’s Law Center, more than 2.3 million women have left the American labor force since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, 2020. For Hillary Petrie, partner with Stephanie Beamer and Crystal Ellis in New York’s Egg Collective, this data is more than just an “incredible loss in creative capital.” It points to the “motherhood penalty,” or the sociological term for the price women pay in their professional careers when they also serve as parents and caregivers. “Careers are too often side-burnered or abandoned,” says Beamer.
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‘Here, as in Heaven’ is the title of Ndidi Emefiele’s current exhibition, a body of work representing the artist’s philosophical attempt to understand the tragic death of her sister.
These paintings represent a significant shift from the playful conjuring with the complexity of contemporary experience and female identity that characterised her earlier work. They are works that carry the vestiges of pain from loss of relationship with her sister as they seek to question life, the afterlife, the passage of time, and being. Like so many artists before her, Emefiele is engaging with the intangible mysteries of existence in ways that explore the possibility of the beyond.