Caroline Mcauliffe

Caroline McAuliffe’s work explores identity as something performed, negotiated, and continually reshaped through family life. Working across costume, sculpture, photography, and performance, she examines the intersections of motherhood, queerness, caregiving, and shifting family dynamics. Mothering is both subject and material in her practice, becoming a way to expand the visual histories of families like her own.

Collaboration with her child is central to this work. Through play, painting, masking, costume, and orchestrated installations, McAuliffe transforms the textures of domestic life into a visual language that moves between intimacy and performance. These acts of making together elevate the everyday realities of caregiving and family life into objects and images of desire, while challenging familiar representations of motherhood and the family.

McAuliffe is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and community organizer based in Brooklyn. She holds an M.F.A. from Pratt Institute, and her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, the Children’s Museum of the Arts in New York, the Kyoto Shibori Museum in Japan, and the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea. She was a semifinalist in the Smithsonian’s 2025 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and a 2025 fellow at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts.

McAuliffe is also a founding member of Mother Creatrix Collective (MCC), which creates exhibitions and platforms for artists navigating the intersections of motherhood, caregiving, and artistic practice. MCC received a 2026 Brooklyn Arts Council grant for its exhibition I am aware of my heart, it opens and closes. She lives and works in Brooklyn with her wife and child.