
Kristen Radtke’s Pregnancy in Art
The illustrator reflects on her journey to motherhood and how it changed her relationship to art.
Kristen Radtke
May 8, 2024
“One night in 2022 my eyes snapped open in the middle of the night and I had this concrete thought that I was ready to have a baby,” says the writer and comics creator Kristen Radtke. “It was the most euphoric feeling I’ve ever had.” The Brooklyn-based author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness and Imagine Wanting Only This, Radtke initially approached motherhood with trepidation. “Work was the primary reason I was unsure about having children for so long,” she explains. “I didn’t want to sacrifice the time and space to think and draw and write.” As she describes in this month’s Drawn to MoMA, finding the balance between being a parent and an artist may not be easy, but it is eminently achievable. “We often talk about motherhood as something that’s hard and draining, which it can be, but it’s also genuinely fun and stimulating,” Radtke says. “I hope we can let the experience fuel us.”























Kristen Radtke is the author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness (2021) and Imagine Wanting Only This (2017). Her work has been nominated for a PEN/Jean Stein Award, an Eisner Award, the Kirkus Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Metal, and numerous National Magazine Awards. Her comics and writing have appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Marie Claire, the Atlantic, Elle, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and other publications.
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