Clarice Tara Cuda
just drawings of my baby, 2023
Micron pen, mixed-media paper

This work was on loan for the exhibition, In Relation, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, April 19 - November 23, 2024

“Can I just draw my baby? Is this something that is valid and able to connect to other people? It’s valid to me, but is it valid for others?” As an artist and a new mother, Clarice Tara Cuda was afraid that drawings of her baby would not seem important. “We’re almost told not to. It’s like: you’ve just had a baby, of course you want to draw your baby, don’t draw your baby.” Her emotions of doubt and insufficiency were juxtaposed with the sense that birth had been a momentous event, something that upended all of her certainties as an artist and took her back to a place of absolute discovery. “It’s like trying to understand the expanse and birth of the universe, that’s what it feels like trying to conceptualize what it is to be a mom … I feel I’m like a one year old and back at square one,” she says. “Birth is my sense of awe and terror, it’s my sense of the sublime.“