I bought the book version of Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973–79) in 2006 at the urging of art historian Griselda Pollock, whom I met at the Difference Reframed: Considering the Legacy of Feminist Art History conference in Brighton, England, that year. I was only four years into teaching a course on women artists, and when I told Pollock that my unit on “Women and Motherhood” was short on conceptual art, she recommended Kelly. When the book arrived, I was galvanized. Here was a work of art about maternity that was aesthetically unlike anything I’d ever seen, but that I instinctively recognized to be as truthful as Impressionist Berthe Morisot’s 1872 ennui-laden portrait of her sister Edma keeping an exhausted watch over her baby daughter’s cradle. Begun in 1973 upon the birth of Kelly’s son, Post-Partum Document was a six-year endeavor, resulting in an installation comprised of six consecutive “Documentations”—135 pieces...

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