Artist Naima Green has created a groundbreaking photography exhibition that blurs the lines between fiction and reality as she explores contemporary motherhood through an intimate lens. Her latest body of work, titled "Instead, I spin fantasies," is currently on display at the International Center of Photography in New York and features a unique combination of self-portraits and photographs of friends and loved ones navigating pregnancy and parenthood.
Green's artistic journey began after she married her wife and fellow artist, Sable Elyse Smith, when people in their circle began asking whether a baby would follow. Despite her love for children as a teacher and her frequent photography of pregnant friends and new parents, Green found herself ambivalent about having children of her own. The 35-year-old artist has wrestled with the reality of parenthood, considering everything from how it would impact her established life and artistic practice in New York to the practical challenges of conception.
A pivotal moment came three years ago when a doctor told Green she should have begun trying to conceive years earlier, advice that felt impossible without a time machine. This experience sparked a complex fascination with pregnancy that Green couldn't fully understand. "Is it about having a child that I'm raising for the rest of my life, or is about this fixation on what people's bodies go through?" she questioned during a phone interview.
To explore these feelings artistically, Green purchased a 20-pound artificial silicone baby bump, though she initially stored it in a closet, unsure how to use it. The breakthrough came during a coffee meeting with curator Elisabeth Sherman, where they discussed ideas for a larger body of work. This collaboration eventually led to the current exhibition, which Sherman curated.
The exhibition presents a diverse collection of images that capture different aspects of family and community life. Sunlit photographs of happy, expectant couples are interspersed with intimate third-trimester portraits and scenes of Green navigating an imagined pregnancy while wearing her prosthetic belly. The work is intentionally expansive, touching on the expected social structures and pressures surrounding parenthood while questioning traditional assumptions about family-making.
"What, to me, feels very critical of this work is that I'm not trying to point to the solution, or say, here is how it's done," Green explained. "I'm trying to explore a very expansive picture across different geographies, different classes, different ideas of family, just as a way of seeing, understanding or creating different possibilities for family-making."
Green's interest in non-traditional forms of family and child-rearing reflects her observations of urban life, where people often follow predictable patterns of meeting, starting families, then moving to suburbs with limited support from extended family and friends. Even within her queer community, which theoretically embraces expansive ideas about family and community, she has noticed that the proverbial village isn't always present when children arrive.
Through her self-portraits with the prosthetic bump, Green explores different expectations of motherhood with both humor and serious commentary. In one series, she poses in vibrant faux family portraits with fictional father figure DonChristian, a fellow artist. Another image shows her sitting in a kiddie pool with a video camera obscuring her face, commenting on the monetization of motherhood and how intimate family moments become part of personal brands.
Some images deliberately incorporate taboo elements, such as a lit joint in her fingers or nearby cigarette butts, challenging conventional expectations about pregnant women's behavior. Her wife Smith plays a crucial role behind the scenes, setting up shots and helping Green into the prosthetic belly. In one particularly revealing photograph taken in a Philadelphia hotel room, Smith captured Green against a wall in a rolled-up black t-shirt, with the belly's visible seams and pale coloring clearly breaking the fourth wall.
Green noted the difficulty of finding a prosthetic that matched her skin tone, which added another layer of meaning to the work by questioning societal assumptions about who we envision as mothers. This detail highlights broader issues of representation and inclusivity in discussions about pregnancy and motherhood.
As Green developed the project further, conversations with friends continued to influence her work. She heard from people who said pregnancy was the only time they felt freed from concerns about body image and thinness, while others followed intensive diets and niche advice or completely rejected traditional motherhood literature. "People reach for the things that make them feel the most in control in a really kind of wild time," she observed. "And who am I to say that it's wrong or right for that person? But culturally, we have so many opinions on what mothers and pregnant people are supposed to do and how they're supposed to do it."
The series will continue to be ongoing as Green makes new connections and opens discussions through her work. She reports feeling a greater sense of possibility about what community and family can look like. Recently, she began making early plans with a close friend who is planning to become pregnant, offering to live with her for a month or six weeks to be part of the early child-rearing process.
"I said to her, 'Well, I would love to be part of those very early days with you. I could come live with you for a month, or six weeks, and be part of the process of someone raising a child, even though that child is not mine,'" Green recalled. "But to be deeply rooted in community means that we are all responsible for you and your baby's well-being. And that felt really exciting to me, because I think that's not often the way I hear people thinking about friendship when they bring their children home."
Green's vision extends beyond traditional nuclear family structures to embrace a model that invites more trusted people into children's lives. This approach challenges the deeply American notion that nuclear families must be entirely self-sustaining and instead proposes community-based child-rearing as a viable alternative. Through her artistic exploration of fictional and real pregnancy experiences, Green opens up new conversations about the many pathways to creating and sustaining family in contemporary society.
