Photo by Suzanne Townsend | The Crow’s Nest
By Suzanne Townsend
In the Factory building across the space from Daddy Kool Records you can find the Museum of Motherhood, or MOM. It’s the one with the chair covered in boobs and the life-size image of Sojourner Truth, and it’s the first and only museum of its kind.
MOM founder and director Martha Joy Rose found herself embedded in New York City’s art and music scenes, but when she looked around her she noticed something lacking. Even though every human has a mother, even though women and birth givers are central to every person’s existence, it’s a pretty thankless job.
“We have so few women’s spaces period in the world and in America. So I really am committed to the history of women as they have existed and as they have not been represented in museums and textbooks in all areas,” Rose said. She joked that if we had all gotten to Earth in a rocketship designed by Elon Musk we’d have erected dozens of museums and universities and schools to study the rocket ship, so why don’t we celebrate and study motherhood and birth?
“We have just a handful of places where we can even look at women’s lives, let alone the lives of mothers and the mothers are the one thing we all share. We all have one. We all came from one. And we live in a space where we’re kind of repulsed or repelled by women’s bodies.”
Rose began the museum in New York but soon outgrew the space and looked south to St. Petersburg as a cultural center and city of museums. After housing the collection in her own St. Petersburg home for years, MOM finally found a space in the Factory in September 2023.
The museum exists at the intersection of art, science and herstory, dedicating a section of the space to each field as it relates to motherhood. There are works of art, anatomical models and summaries of the waves of feminism throughout America’s history. The museum stresses the importance of being inclusive of all reproductive identities, a relatively new phrase added to the field’s vocabulary to be inclusive of all as people’s identities shift and grow. “You might still be procreating as a nonbinary or trans individual and we certainly want to make space for you for that,” Rose said.
The collection in the museum rotates every four months, and one piece Rose highlighted is Madison Hendry’s “Womb Project,” a series of self portraits taken throughout the artist’s pregnancy which depict her crocheting a womb out of red yarn. One of the few permanent museum pieces is Helen Heibert’s “Mother Tree” which, standing at the center of the space, is a tall structure made of paper with nursing tendrils descending down to many skeins of yarn crocheted by hundreds of artists.
Rose highlighted, too, the importance of healing. She shared an anecdote about her rocky relationship with her own mother, about a profound experience she had while getting an EKG. “I saw my heart lighting up on the screen and I thought, oh my God, my mother made this heart for me. She gave it to me for free. She’s dead, and I’m still walking around…Even if she fucked everything else up, she gave me my life. That’s pretty rad.” Rose shares this attitude towards healing and forgiveness with museum patrons as well, patrons who may not speak with their mother or who have some processing and healing to do when it comes to that relationship in their life.
In the midst of constant event planning and programming, Rose has even bigger plans for the museum. They hope to have their own building with a floor dedicated to each section of art, science and herstory. Another of Rose’s goals is to collaborate more extensively with the University of South Florida’s social work and art students as she had with students from Hunter and Columbia in New York.
The Museum of Motherhood is free and open to the public by donation. It is located inside the Factory 2606 Fairfield Ave. S. St. Pete, open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 7 p.m.
