Alison Mutha’s memoir, “The Third Setting,” is available for preorder now. Her show “A Kindness of Crows” runs Nov. 15–Jan. 10 at Regen Projects, Los Angeles.
: A featured contributor whose work often delves into the visceral and sometimes uncomfortable aspects of motherhood. Her notable essay, "Not My Newborn’s Mother," examines the psychological and physical experience of a surrogate, detailing the "otherness" felt during the postpartum period and the exhausting nature of newborn care. alison mutha magazine article
Born in suburban Maryland to an Indian-American cardiologist and a Jewish folk musician from the Bronx, Mutha grew up in a house where a discussion about the Bohr model of the atom could segue into a Dixieland jazz session. “My father wanted me to be a surgeon,” she laughs. “My mother wanted me to be Joan Baez. They compromised by buying me a secondhand Moog synthesizer and a scalpel. I was the only 12-year-old at the science fair who could dissect a frog and score the procedure in D minor.” 10 at Regen Projects, Los Angeles
: The article details the "absurdist staycation" of camping out in an empty maternity ward room, caught between the hope of becoming parents and the reality that the expectant mother has every right to change her mind. Born in suburban Maryland to an Indian-American cardiologist
The result is her first solo gallery show, “A Kindness of Crows,” opening this November at Regen Projects in Hollywood. The paintings are massive, brooding landscapes where the horizon is always a little crooked. Crows appear in every frame—sometimes as observers, sometimes as the landscape itself. “A group of crows is called a ‘murder,’” she notes. “But I think that’s wrong. When I was out there, they kept me company. They reminded me that solitude isn’t loneliness. It’s just a different frequency.”
That dinner party, as it happens, is the subject of her upcoming memoir, The Third Setting (out next spring from Tiny Reparations Books). Part recipe collection, part philosophical treatise on creative burnout, and part love letter to her late grandmother—a Tamil mathematician who taught her how to fold samosas and fractals with equal precision—the book is as unclassifiable as Mutha herself.