New York City nonprofit Artists & Mothers has named the 2026 recipients of its eponymous $25,000 grant for artists who identify as mothers. The landmark program provides funding to cover nine months of childcare and is open to emerging and mid-career artists raising a child under the age of three.
From photography and sculpture to collage and bookmaking, this year’s awardees span a wide range of artistic practices, conceptual concerns, and styles. Mimi Ọnụọha centers human and machine relationships, sometimes combining family photographs with video and images sourced from the internet. The 2025 single-channel video Ground Truths, for example, unearthed a buried history—literally, a mass grave—in Sugar Land, near the artist’s hometown, using a machine-learning model trained to identify similar sites across the state.
Mimi Ọnụọha.
Photograph by Casey Horsfield. Courtesy the artist
Nickola Pottinger, an artist born in Jamaica and raised in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, works across drawing, collage, and sculpture. Her sculptural works, which she calls “duppies”—the Jamaican patois word for ghosts—pay tribute to her cultural heritage through its physical remnants. Found heirlooms, repurposed materials, and pigmented pulp made from personal documents and past artworks, blended in a kitchen mixer, form the basis of the works featured in her 2025 exhibition at the The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. Pottinger is included, too, in this year’s Greater New York survey at MoMA PS1.
“The Artists & Mothers grant arrives at a profoundly pivotal chapter in my life,” Pottinger said. “This support gives our daughter access to quality childcare and education during her earliest years while also giving me the invaluable time and space to continue nurturing my art practice alongside motherhood.” She added that such support is “truly rare.”
Ọnụọha echoed the sentiment: “Creative labor is work. Motherhood is work. Artists & Mothers is the rare organization willing to act like it.”
Sara Cwynar.
Courtesy the artist
Awardee Sara Cwynar, a Vancouver-born photographer, filmmaker, and installation based in Brooklyn, is best known for sensory-shocking collages with pop-cultural imagery. In her 2025 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, she drew on search-engine algorithms to assemble collages of reclining women, luxury cars, and pristine-looking food coupled with hand-written annotations, questioning the performance and advertisement of domesticity. Mimicking the addictive pull and passive consumption of social media, these works also function as critiques of capitalism.
The final awardee, Trisha Baga, a Queens native, works across multimedia installation, ceramics, and performance, exploring, among other themes, the increasing encroachment of technology into everyday life. Speaking to Art in America last year, Baga described her return to filmmaking after first gaining recognition for her 3D video works and then taking a five-year hiatus to focus on painting. Now sharing her studio with a toddler, she reflected on how meeting her studio practice with motherhood: “While making the work, I eventually figured out a way to think about it while I was hanging out with my kid, Homer, and to film with him. He’d get excited and be like, “It’s time to make video art! Where’s my tripod?”
Trisha Baga.
Photo by Molly Dektar. Courtesy the artist
Cwynar, in a statement to ARTnews, agreed: “Having a baby as an artist in America is a daunting proposition, and I have often felt split in a million places since having a child. The cognitive dissonance is insane because it has been the most joy of my life mixed with the most stress around my work and studio and trying to keep it all going.”
This grant, Cwynar added, “is an absolute game changer.”
Now in its second grant cycle, Artists & Mothers awarded its first grant to Carissa Rodriguez. The program was founded by artist Maria De Victoria and arts consultant Julia Trotta, who had been “workshopping an idea around a resource for artists who are mothers,” Trotta told ARTnews in a 2024 interview. The grant amount—$25,000—was set to approximate the average annual cost of full-time childcare in New York City.
