Naima Green’s intimate, imagined self-portrait of motherhood

Artist Naima Green was blessed with a matriarch she called Aunt Dot, who lived 95 years on earth. Aunt Dot foresaw a family for Green, so she prepared by filling a hope chest with hand-knit baby clothes and elegantly embroidered linens. When she passed in 2023, Green felt bereft, losing a woman she loved, and the dream nurtured since she was a teen. 

Here in the sacred space of possibility, Green began to imagine ​“prosthetic lives” – versions of a woman with her face and her body bearing child and building a community of like minds. She purchased a prosthetic pregnancy belly in 2023, not quite knowing where this instinct would lead. ​“I wanted to wear it but got overwhelmed being seen in it,” she reveals. ​“I wore it once to our local coffee shop, took it off, and put it in the closet.” 

A year later, Green returned to that moment of conception, this time with curator Elizabeth Sherman, to explore the profound possibilities, mysteries, and taboos that the promise of new life holds. Weaving together a series of constructed self-portraits, landscapes, and still life, Green crafts an intimate series of tableaux for Instead, I spin fantasies, now on view at the International Center of Photography in New York. 

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“This project began because I am still trying to figure out if the nuclear family is something I want for my life. You get married, have kids. It’s a very formulaic trajectory I feel complicated about,” Green says. ​“I wanted to try this on to know, Am I just romanticising pregnancy or am I thinking critically about what it means to have a child right now. What does it mean to give up my life for another person? What does it mean to be a parent, raise a child, have a family?” 

Green allowed her ambivalence to lead her in front of the camera, a place she does not occupy, to coexist in one body as seer and seen. ​“I was thinking about environments to work in, character to embody, situations to be in, and once I got the conceptual framework, I started to get a lot looser making them,” Green says. ​“It became a mix of an all-day affair, and then, I put on the belly, I’m pregnant for 30 minutes, and then go have dinner.” 

From that space of detachment, Green could enter the difficult spaces where pregnancy engulfs identity. Judgment and expectation abound, as do more nefarious claims, such as allegations by the US head of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., linking Tylenol taken in utero to autism, which he since walked back on. While state governments continue repealing reproductive rights, criminalising abortion, and cutting Medicaid, Black women are 3.5 times more likely to die from pregnancy complications than white women in the United States. 

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“Although it was not the reason I was making the work, I was more aware of headline after headline of the assault on our rights. All of those things are in the ecosystem of this work,” Green says. 

Rather Instead, I spin fantasies considers the chasm between public and private lives, literally and figuratively. Prior to the exhibition, Green told few of the work, and none of the details that consumed her life. She remembers, ​“All of a sudden it was made public, and I felt this swell of emotion realising people were going to judge me – but that’s the point.” 

Naima Green: Instead, I spin fantasies is on view through January 12, 2026, at the International Center of Photography in New York.

Miss Rosen is a freelance arts and photography writer, follow her on X.

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