Paintings and t-shirts photographed by Nancy J. Parisi. Wall text and scenes photographed by Olivier Delrieu Shulze. Graphics created by Claire Connolly.
A bitten lemon, a patched jacket, a poured out coconut. Images like these populate this painting and t-shirt series about the pregnancy experience. Notably absent are mother-and-baby scenes and round bellies. Connolly approaches this aspect of motherhood without its conventional imagery in order to find new ways of engaging with the physical adventure of bearing children, so that audiences of all genders and lifestyles can see themselves in the heroic childbearer. She invokes the ubiquitous male warrior hero for comparison: pregnant people, especially those of color, put their lives on the line for the greater good.
Fitz Books and Waffles, Buffalo’s most robust ‘third space,’ presented See Me Bearing on June 6, 2025. The event—an art opening, panel discussion and t-shirt sale—invited ‘the Childbearer’ into our universal collective consciousness. Throughout the preceding year, Connolly’s portraitees worked with her to create personal symbols reflecting their inner experiences of having children. By painting and designing this dual series, she has created a new visual language of heroic prestige around the archetypal mother. The event both offered this symbolism to audiences, and placed art and real neighbors in a shared space wherein the resulting atmosphere prompted panelists—artist, curator, Gender Studies academic, OBGYN/health advocate, community health worker, and activist doula alike—to engage honestly in a public discussion.
Each 4-foot x 5-foot oil painting depicts a childbearer interacting with a symbolic object of their choice. In one piece, Keira Grant, who lost one of her twins—a reality faced disproportionately by black mothers— developed the idea of a lemon, and the act of biting into one of its wedges, as her symbol. Grant explains, “a lemon is fragrant. Not only the juice but the bitter rind can be delicious in food. But it’s also sour and intense. I live in a perpetual duality, it’s constantly ‘this and that’ every moment—joy and grief. I bite the lemon and let my face pucker to embrace the beauty of all parts of my world.”
The concept for this project emerged from a personal journey; Connolly’s own mental health crisis revealed to her the ways in which fundamental human truths are both encoded in the childbearing experience, and conspicuously absent from the West’s exalted cultural landscape. She also saw that this imbalance contributes to injustice for many, not just people with ovaries, and quite pertinently and urgently for pregnant people of color. Social determinants of health such as food and housing insecurity, chronic stress, and systemic inequalities impact outcomes and well-being for black and brown mothers; starkly, the numbers bearing these conditions out reveal their prevalence in the United States, alone among wealthy nations. Not surprisingly, Buffalo is hit hard by this issue. Here, Connolly has partnered with doula/community center Cary House Buffalo, and with two local organizations that target maternal inequities within Buffalo: Our Mommie Village, and Buffalo Prenatal Perinatal Network.
See Me Bearing references the role traditional oil painting has played in advancing the prestige of heroic male figures, as well as the way such figures influence reproduced consumer visuals, to imagine an alternate arc of history that includes a more fully human paradigm. While the male hero tends to represent certainty, linear progress, independence, and the glory of a fixed eternity, Connolly sees the childbearing hero, and the symbols emerging from the portraitees in this series, as emblematic of murky dualities, cyclical time, interdependence, and a visceral understanding of mortality.
Connolly repays the generosity of the seven people who have shared their inner experiences, by granting each of them their own oil portrait. Thus, at the close of the exhibit, each one is free to leverage art as wealth however they choose. The only aspect of this work that is available for any form of direct market engagement is the line of t-shirts; these feature each symbol shown in the oil paintings figured in ink and screen printed. Audiences may wear these to catalyze their own vibrant relationships with Connolly’s proposed ‘Childbearer’ archetype.