October Split Level Gallery 2025
Taking Care: Parenthood in a Political Climate
curated by Dara Herman Zierlein
October 3 - October 30
Opening Reception on Arts Night Out
The exhibition will forego the vernacular imagery of parenthood. It features an all-gender, inclusive group of artists who are parents, caregivers, or adult children caring for their own parents, partners, or loved ones during illness. As binary gender roles in American families evolve, these changes impact culture and are increasingly politicized. This exhibition highlights diverse artists who focus on modern perspectives of parenthood and caregiving. Each artist will provide a short statement to accompany their work.
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Dara Herman Zierlein was born in Brooklyn, NY and was raised in Manhattan. She is a graduate of Pratt Institute with a BFA in Sculpture and she earned a Master's Degree in Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. Dara currently lives in Western Massachusetts with her family working as a political illustrator. Dara’s paintings, illustrations and posters have been exhibited internationally. Her art is published in among others, Mom Egg Review, Resist Grab Back, The Earth Issue, Demeter Press, Lunch Ticket, and she is a contributor for OppArt in The Nation magazine.
Dara has received several grants to curate group exhibitions and create art programs for the community on themes such as equal rights, women's rights, parenthood and the climate crisis. Dara's most recent grant is the ArtEZ Grant from the Northampton Arts Council for an exhibition called "Parenthood in a Political Climate". She is a recipient of the Mass Cultural Council's Cultural Sector Recovery Grants 2022 and a recipient for the NY Rauschenberg Artists Grant 2023.
Dara is the author of her first children’s book ‘Don’t Eat the Plastic’, a playful tale of the consequences of plastic pollution on our environment published February 2021 with Olympi Publishers in London. She was celebrated this past April with a 40th Year Art Retrospective Exhibition at Springfield Tech Community College where she exhibited over a hundred and fifty illustrations.
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Having a child radicalized me in unexpected ways. Looking into my newborn infant’s face was a portal to incomprehensible mysteries of the universe, opening my heart to a kind of love I didn’t know was possible. All the usual mushy new mom stuff applied to my situation. New motherhood also exposed me to some of the failings of our societal system here in the U.S. Having to get a new job and leave my tiny infant in the care of others for most of the day broke my heart-and pissed me off. Why was it not possible to stay home with my baby? Why are so many parents forced to work multiple jobs with only a scant few weeks-if we’re lucky and/or privileged-for bonding and infant care? Why are the workers who care for some of society’s most precious and vulnerable members of our families-day care workers, preschool teachers, nursing home workers-paid the least? I learned to start asking these questions when I became a mom, and from then the focus of my work shifted from a pretty self-centered place to a more outward-facing practice. The pages in this show are from my graphic memoir, titled, Clutter: A Scatterbrained Sexual Assault Memoir (Fieldmouse Press, 2022). I share some of the painful stuff-or just human stuff-that has happened to me in hopes of starting conversations about things we need to talk about more openly.
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The three pieces exhibited in this show are part of a series titled The Dance of Dementia. It is about my eight-year journey as caregiver for my husband, who bravely struggled with Parkinson’s Disease and Parkinson’s Disease dementia as a result of massive exposure to Agent Orange when he was drafted in Vietnam. For the first five of those eight years I took care of my mother as well. She had both Vascular Dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. The collection is also about their own personal journeys, as they danced between a distant light that periodically still glowed in their eyes and the demoralizing decline of both their cognitive and physical abilities. My mother’s glow was just a distant memory after she passed in December of 2020, my husband’s quickly dimmed to a filmy grey, masking the glory of all he once was, until he too passed away in October of 2022.
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I am Dara Herman-Zierlein, the curator of the exhibit, Taking Care: Parenthood in a Political Climate. As a political artist I am rigorously using my illustrations to advocate awareness in the world. I picked these pieces for the exhibition as inspiration of hope for humanity in dark times, uplifting our shared commonality in hopes to better understand one another.
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''I know that within the depth of my soul, the light of creativity prevails and orchestrates a symphony to the rhythm of our hearts. My strong interest in world travel, and my love for the environment compelled me to paint the story of climate change. My travels throughout the world have granted me a firsthand view of the melting glaciers and deforestation, which has served to underscore the importance of my work." -Ed Moret
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Motherhood is a mystery which is primal to our identity as a species, and central to our concept of the divine. It carries a thick overlay of sentimentality which must be stripped away to understand parenting as both human and divine. These images are part of a series of paintings representing the petals of a flower. The flower is meant to enclose a human body in the gentle and comforting embrace of the Mother. Each of the petals represents an aspect of the feminine divine, as experienced in my dreams. The purpose of the piece is to reclaim from the unconscious those aspects of spiritual life which have been forgotten, repressed, appropriated, or distorted due to misogyny.
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Jon Schluenz is a multimedia artist, architect, and builder currently residing in Northampton. Nature boy is an assemblage of inherited objects received after the illness and passing of his father. It is an attempt to acknowledge the quiet caregiver, and transfigure the mess of grief and the weight of a handed-down history.
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“Single mother and Sun” (a portrait of me and my mother) speaks to the journey, of raising a young boy with no father figure in a male dominated environment and society, how softness in the spirit of a child hardens over the years, dealing with the oppression of racism, classism, and a school system with no room for alternative learners. For young black men, needless to say, the political climate parallel with the state of being black in America can produce some of the most beautiful souls that shape the very fabric and foundations of our society on a daily basis.
IG@building_121
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In my role as a care-taker and parent I want to enjoy, preserve, instill and teach a set of core values that former US president Franklin D. Roosevelt called “The Four Freedoms”: Freedom of Speech, Freedom to Worship, Freedom from Want and Freedom form Fear, famously illustrated by Norman Rockwell. However as it is, these core values don’t seem to hold anymore in the face of a huge rise in antisemitic and religiously motivated crime, normalized hate speech, suppression of dissent, children suffering homelessness and food insecurity among the wealth right here in the Conneticut River Valley, people being disappeared by fully masked ICE agents and sent to foreign prisons or stateside concentration camps without due process, the US national guard and US army patrolling American cities, pointing their guns at protesting American citizens. I do my parenting, my teaching, and my taking care with the caveat that these freedoms will have to have to be fought for and claimed all over again.
Sincerely,
Peter O Zierlein
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Her art, both process and result, is a mining of observation. It is an exploration of symbol, color, form, shape, ideas She is an arbiter of spontaneity and control, always reaching for the edges of plasticity, playing at line, color and form. Using and combining mediums, she achieves a tactility and fluidity, layering between depth and two-dimensionality. In her visual art she will often start a curious mix of in and out that draws forth a deeper observation of the picture plane. From painting, monotype and collage to stained glass and poetry, her range of mediums portrays a path of exploration for both artist and observer. In the art displayed here, she reminds us of the rising waters of climate change. Children peek from what seems a safe distance as if looking into an aquarium, but on closer observation. we see that the waters are swirling out of control and fish are caught upside down in the current of climate change.
ROSALIND BRENNER-Painter, Poet, Stained Glass Artist
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I selected these two paintings for the show because they represent my journey as a caregiver. I am a teaching artist as well and find that my once abundant patience and energy in the classroom is a challenge to keep up most likely because of the energy I need as a caregiver. The balance of self care and responsibility is always in flux and I often am wondering about the future ahead. Smothered was painted sometime during the pandemic when I began my journey as a caregiver. The feeling of being inside the earth with a starless sky above, yet at rest, represents the numbness when receiving life-changing news. Buoyant reflects the feeling of bobbing in the waters of the unknown future ahead. This is a work that is part of an ongoing ocean series, capturing the depth of uncertainty.
IG@rco.art