The Other Mona Lisa - An Ode to a Mother's Smile

ABBY

The Other Mona Lisa - An Ode to a Mother's Smile

From the series Together, Again

2024

Acrylic on canvas

36 × 36 in. (91 × 91 cm)

CURATORIAL NOTE

The Other Mona Lisa situates motherhood within the broader framework of social reproduction, examining maternal presence not solely as personal memory but as a structurally organized role embedded in cultural, economic, and institutional systems. While the artwork evokes warmth and shared intimacy, it reveals how motherhood is shaped by enduring expectations that position care as natural, selfless, and morally obligatory.

Motherhood is constituted within legal, economic, and cultural frameworks that exalt sacrifice while withholding commensurate structural support. Policies surrounding parental leave, childcare, healthcare access, and wage equity rarely align with the magnitude of labor demanded, rendering care morally indispensable yet materially marginalized. Across institutional and communal spheres, gendered responsibilities are continuously reproduced and naturalized, obscuring their structural design. These conditions are ultimately embodied in everyday life through attachment, memory, and the intergenerational transmission of identity, where affection unfolds within expectations that quietly define what motherhood is permitted to be.

The remembered smile becomes more than affection; it signifies the invisible labor through which belonging, stability, and continuity are sustained across generations. By reconstructing maternal presence through artistic form, the artwork reveals how intimate memory is inseparable from the structural conditions that both depend upon and obscure maternal care. The Other Mona Lisa positions motherhood as foundational to social continuity while exposing the quiet architectures that shape and regulate it.

ARTWORK & COLLECTOR INFORMATION

This original artwork is created on museum-grade cotton duck canvas using professional acrylic paints, presented on a 1.5 in. (3.8 cm) gallery-wrapped stretcher, allowing the work to be displayed without additional framing. The canvas is archival and acid-free, ensuring long-term preservation.

The artwork ships worldwide in its stretched format. Each original work is accompanied by a hand-signed Certificate of Authenticity co-signed by the artist and the gallery. As is standard with original artworks, all sales are final once the work has been acquired by a collector.