Feminism and motherhood have been perceived as incompatible. The second-wave of the Women’s Movement of the 1960s focused on equality of the sexes and resulted in women rejecting the “traditional” female roles of wife and mother It was not procreation or mothering per se with which feminism took issue, but the patriarchal institution of motherhood, which limited the identity of a woman to “mother” and devalued the labor of mother work. The politics of the Women’s Movement permeated the art world, and members of the feminist art movement endeavored to provide alternative, positive images of women to counter the objectification of women in art and popular culture. Generally excluded from this presentation of positive female imagery was motherhood. Contemporary artists Catherine Opie, Renée Cox and Janine Antoni represent the mother. Their work as, what I call, maternalists, is a feminist statement claiming the subjectivity of the mother historically denied. The works of second-wave feminist artists Hannah Wilke and Mary Kelly are both critical to the work of these contemporary artists as was the epistemological shift in thinking about female and maternal subjectivity.