Mother | Tabitha Boekweit x Cathelijne Blok x REVUSD
We believe art can move - not just as expression, but as impact. With her artwork Mother, artist Tabitha Boekweit paid tribute to the quiet power and tender fragility of motherhood. That work now lives on in the Charity Pouch Mother, carried by Cathelijne Blok — art historian, founder of The TittyMag, mother-to-be, and the face of this campaign. More than design, it carries hope forward: all proceeds are donated to the Prinses Máxima Centrum, supporting their mission to cure every child with cancer, with optimal quality of life.
Mothers who move: stories of strength and softness
Motherhood in art often gets the soft-focus treatment: sweet, sentimental, background noise. But some artists tore up that script and showed it for what it really is — power and pressure, joy and chaos, love and loss (often all at once). In this piece we line up a few favourites who put motherhood centre stage, brush in hand, mic on, camera rolling. From Berthe Morisot’s quietly radical Cradle to Beyoncé’s unapologetic Homecoming: women who made motherhood visible in their art.
Sally Mann: Immediate Family
In the early 1990s, American photographer Sally Mann shocked and fascinated the art world with Immediate Family: a series of intimate portraits of her three young children. Shot at home in rural Virginia, the images show scraped knees, wet swims, naps in the grass. Childhood in all its rawness.
Critics accused Mann of blurring boundaries; others hailed the work as groundbreaking. What made it radical wasn’t just the nudity or vulnerability, but the gaze: a mother portraying her children with honesty, complexity, and love, far from sentimental clichés.
Immediate Family placed the mess, beauty, and contradictions of motherhood in full view. Tender, uncomfortable, and unforgettable.
Beyoncé: Lemonade & Homecoming
Beyoncé has never kept her personal life off stage, but in Lemonade (2016) and Homecoming (2019) she placed motherhood front and centre. Both works spotlight Black motherhood not as burden, but as brilliance. A source of strength, lineage, and legacy.
In Lemonade, images of mothers and daughters wove resilience into every frame, while Homecoming (her Coachella documentary) showed the unglamorous reality of performing months after giving birth to twins. The discipline, the exhaustion, the devotion: all part of the art.
Berthe & Edma Morisot: The Cradle
Berthe and Edma Morisot grew up painting side by side in Paris. One teacher warned their parents this wasn’t just a hobby: the sisters were so talented they would become real painters and that it would be either a revolution or a catastrophe.
While their careers took off, Edma was forced to give up painting when she married. But Berthe kept painting her. In The Artist’s Sister at a Window (1869), she captured Edma’s resignation. But it was The Cradle (1872) that said it all. Edma, gazing at her newborn, painted with both tenderness and tension. She adored her child, but Berthe’s brush hints at the cost: motherhood had forced her to abandon her art. Critics dismissed the work as sweet motherhood, but it was far more radical: a portrait of love entangled with loss, at a time when such truths were rarely shown.
For the next decade, Berthe kept painting mothers and children, pioneering a theme that had barely existed before.
Lauryn Hill: To Zion
By the late ’90s Lauryn Hill was at the peak of her career, dropping timeless tracks like Ex-Factor and Doo Wop (That Thing). But on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (1998) she did something different: she wrote To Zion. The song is a love letter to her son, born against all advice. Industry voices told her to put her career first; she chose motherhood instead. With lyrics that blend faith, fear, and devotion, Hill turned a personal decision into a universal anthem. To Zion made clear that for Hill, motherhood wasn’t a setback: it was power, purpose, and the centre of her art.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Notes on Motherhood
Best known for We Should All Be Feminists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has always written about power, gender and identity. When she became a mother, those themes cut even closer. In essays and talks, she’s spoken openly about the clash between expectation and reality: the pressure to be endlessly available, the guilt of working, the joy and exhaustion that come as a package deal.
What makes Adichie’s take radical isn’t sentimentality but honesty. She refuses to romanticise motherhood. Instead, she treats it as part of a larger story of women claiming space. Her words remind us that raising a child can be both empowering and overwhelming, and that both truths deserve to be told.
Check out the Charity Pouch "Mother" - Tabitha Boekweit!
Charity Pouch "Mother" - Tabitha Boekweit
€249,00
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