Since 2024, this nonprofit has been tackling one of the art world’s biggest blind spots: supporting working mothers. Artists & Mothers offers grants for nine months of childcare to New York-based artists with children under 3.
What’s one work of art that got you through an important moment in your life?
Julia Trotta (co-founder): Mon fils, a performance by Lea Lublin from 1968, where the artist cared for her 7-month-old son, Nicolas, as a conceptual and political gesture in the context of an exhibition at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Name an influence of yours that might surprise people.
Elizabeth Karp-Evans (board member): “I’m constantly inspired by women who make space for others to create, collaborate, and evolve in. It’s a courageous act to support individuals who are interrogating the structure of society through their art. Thelma Golden and the late, brilliant Koyo Kouoh, both extraordinary curators, have an outsized influence on my own work and practice at the moment.”
What do you think is your biggest contribution to culture?
Camille Henrot (board member): “We’re bringing the issues and needs of artist parents into a mainstream art world conversation, where in the past it’s been a very siloed subject.”
What’s something people get wrong about you?
Sarah Goulet (board member): “That we’re a mommy club.”
What do you want to see more of in your industry? Less of?
Maria De Victoria (co-founder): “I want an art world rooted in care, equity, and shared power, where gatekeeping and precarity are dismantled, support is tangible, and everyone feels they belong.”
What’s been the hardest part of your career so far?
Maia Ruth Lee (board member): “To balance everything—to put care in everything that I do, but without losing sight of everything else that is happening in the world.”
What would you like the headline of your obituary to be?
Bridget Donahue (board member): “She Tried.”
What keeps you up at night?
Trotta: “Making sure our grants are funded.”
What would you wear to meet your greatest enemy?
Lee: “I’d wear what I wear every day: my studio clothes! Baggy comfy everything.”
What is your biggest vice? Your greatest virtue?
Donahue: “Vice: running my mouth. Virtue: running my mouth.”
What question do you ask yourself most often while you’re making work?
Victoria: “I often ask myself who it serves, and how it can fight inequity and amplify voices too often ignored or overlooked.”
Who do you call the most?
Trotta: “Maria.”
Lee: “Julia.”
When’s the last time you laughed hysterically?
Goulet: “This photo shoot.”
What grounds you, and what invigorates you?
Victoria: “I’m grounded by the everyday struggles we all face—financial, emotional, personal—and by how confronting them can bring clarity, strength, and growth. As an artist, I believe struggle is part of life—not something to dwell in, but something that helps us move forward and deepen our work.”
Karp-Evans: “I’m grounded by the concept of time and invigorated by the knowledge that it can expand and contract. I’m also always late.”
What are you looking forward to this year?
Goulet: “Ei Arakawa-Nash’s Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, which will reflect on his experience as a queer parent. At our inaugural gala last year, we presented a version of Ei’s Mega Please Draw Freely—which invites guests to draw on a canvas that covers the entire floor—and got to see firsthand how generous and joy-filled his practice can be.”
To read more from the 2026 CULT100 honorees, see the full list here.
in your life?
