A Clamoring Revolt: Restaging, Reseeing, and Reteaching the Womb Chair

The Womb Chair Speaks project is an ongoing, collaborative installation that remakes Eero Saarinen’s 1948 Womb Chair and reimagines the womb’s cultural phenomenology. We begin by providing an overview of the project’s roots and the historical background of mid-century modernism’s erasures of women’s labor and artistry. Second, we consider how the project’s theory and praxis relate to labor. Third, through our personal narratives, we examine how recontextualizing the chair requires the queering of domestic and institutional spaces and traditional pedagogies to support the project’s creative labor. This process affirms individual experiences while embracing communal work and knowledge, forming an antithesis to modernism’s smooth, anonymous standardization and its association with singular genius.

-with support from Working Group, VAC28: Feminist Architecture Praxis