Mom Is Dead, But You Are Going To Cure Her

Mom Is Dead, But You Are Going to Cure Her, an exhibition by West Harlem-based artist and Spanish writer Jana Leo who is also the author or Rape New York, invites viewers into a space of reckoning, memory, and healing — using visual storytelling to give voice to experiences too often left unspoken. About Mom Is Dead, But You Are Going to Cure Her is drawn from Leo's multi-year archive project, subtitled An Archive of Uxoricides, Madrid 1999–2020. The word "uxoricide" — the killing of a wife by her husband or partner — is a clinical, largely forgotten legal term. Leo's project takes it and turns it into something else entirely: for each of more than 130 women murdered by male partners in Madrid over two decades, she has produced a drawing paired with a brief piece of prose or poetry, refusing to let any single death dissolve into an anonymous statistic. https://janaleo.com/2021/12/10/lives-uxoricides/ The project began as a book and has since moved through public exhibitions in Madrid and New York, including a presentation at New York University and an accompanying workshop at the Hispanic Society, where participants used writing and drawing to process trauma and current events. This October, a sampling of the archive travels to West Harlem for its CUNY Library debut. What distinguishes Leo's approach from a conventional memorial is where she directs the work's moral weight. She has been explicit that her intent is to relocate shame from the victim to the aggressor — to interrupt the reflex, still common in casual speech, of normalizing violence, and instead focus public attention on the patterns and mechanisms of the men who commit these killings. The exhibition is, in that sense, less a show about victims than a study of the structure of violence that produces them, made intimate through the drawn line and the short narrative rather than the abstraction of a case file. The exhibition will be on view Monday through Friday, 12:00 Noon to 4:30 PM, at the Cohen Library Archives Gallery, Cohen Library, 160 Convent Avenue, North Academic Center, Room 5/301. Take the 1 to 135th or the B to 135th. Read more Toggle Drawing