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Motherboards

April 10, 2026

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January 10, 2027

Motherboards explores the foundational contributions of women’s work to the technology industry. From the first human computers and programmers, to the women working at electronics factories in Silicon Valley and beyond, to today’s global network of ghost workers, women have been deeply involved with the technologies that undergird our daily lives. Yet their contributions are often left out of official histories of technology.

 

Featuring artists from California and beyond, the exhibition maps an extensive network of women’s work in technology, connecting Silicon Valley’s laboratories and garages to vital work performed at looms, desks, kitchens, and assembly lines across the globe. Motherboards features installations, videos, textiles, and more by Sarah Buckius, Tania Candiani, Priyageetha Dia, Rhonda Holberton, Ahree Lee, Amor Muñoz, Hương Ngô, Mimi Ọnụọha, Sonya Rapoport, Cara Romero, Sarah Rosalena, Analia Saban, Marilou Schultz, the Superkilogirls (Camila Galaz, Ana Meisel, and Lua Vollaard), and Mika Tajima, as well as archival objects from the Computer History Museum.

 

NEW: Exhibit Notes from the MERS are under Didactics.

Motherboards

The exhibit playlist includes a collection of videos related to the exhibit and the artists.

Brown Bag video not available

Brown Bag Video URL 

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Ahree Lee

Short Bio

Ahree Lee was born in Korea and emigrated to the USA as a baby. She is contemporary artist whose work often engages textiles, pattern, and systems of making. Her practice draws connections between craft traditions and technological histories, especially those that have been overlooked or undervalued.

Technology & Artwork Discussion

Lee’s work explores the foundational relationship between weaving and computing. By referencing early textile processes that informed the development of modern computers, her art highlights how technologies we think of as “digital” are rooted in physical, hand-based systems. This connection challenges the idea that technology is purely modern or masculine, instead revealing how women’s labor and craft traditions helped shape computational thinking.


Analia Saban

Short Bio

Analia Saban is an Argentine-born artist based in Los Angeles whose work examines materials, process, and the histories embedded in everyday objects. She frequently blurs boundaries between art, craft, and industrial production.

Technology & Artwork Discussion

Saban’s Tapestries series directly links weaving to computer technology by recreating the layouts of historic circuit boards using woven copper and linen. By translating electronic components into textiles, Saban makes visible the physical structure of digital systems and emphasizes how contemporary computing echoes the logic of the Jacquard loom. Her work invites viewers to reconsider circuit boards not just as technical tools, but as patterned, designed objects with cultural and historical meaning.


Mimi Onuoha

Short Bio

Mimi Onuoha is a Nigerian-American artist and researcher whose work focuses on data, absence, and power. She investigates what data systems include, exclude, and obscure.

Technology & Artwork Discussion

Ọnụọha's installation is part of a larger series called The Hair in the Cable and explores the power dynamics of technology through a cultural lens. The artist deconstructs internet and data cables and physically interweaves them with culturally significant organic materials such as hair, cloth, spices, and earth. This physical intervention is a symbolic gesture to infuse modern technical systems with values and ontologies from Igbo culture (her heritage). It is a critique of what the artist calls "algorithmic violence" and the often invisible labor and colonial legacies embedded within global technological infrastructure.


Sonya Rapoport

Short Bio

Sonya Rapoport (1923–2015) was a pioneering conceptual artist whose work integrated technology, psychology, and audience participation. She was an early adopter of digital tools in artmaking.

Technology & Artwork Discussion

Rapoport used emerging computer technologies to explore human behavior and systems of knowledge. Her work reflects early moments when computing transitioned from a specialized scientific tool into a broader cultural force. By engaging with data and participation, she anticipated contemporary concerns about human interaction with technology and digital systems.


Sarah Rosalena

Short Bio

Sarah Rosalena is a contemporary artist working with textiles, beadwork, and research-based practices. Her work often recovers overlooked histories of women’s labor in science and technology.

Technology & Artwork Discussion

Rosalena’s Standard Candle series translates astronomical data into beaded and woven textiles, recreating images produced by women “computers” at observatories. By materializing algorithms and photographic data through handcraft, her work honors the intellectual and physical labor of women whose contributions were historically uncredited. The fusion of craft and computation underscores how data analysis has long relied on skilled human work.


Hương Ngô

Short Bio

Hương Ngô is a Vietnam-born artist based in Chicago whose work addresses migration, memory, and labor. She often draws from her family history and Southeast Asian diasporic experiences.

Technology & Artwork Discussion

Ngô incorporates electronic components into sculptural forms to reflect the invisible labor of migrant women in electronics manufacturing. By transforming capacitors and circuit parts into delicate artworks, she humanizes industrial processes and highlights the domestic and bodily spaces where technological production has taken place. Her work reveals the social cost behind technological innovation.


Amor Muñoz

Short Bio

Amor Muñoz is a Mexican artist based in Mexico City whose practice centers on electronics, textiles, and collective labor. She often works collaboratively with local communities.

Technology & Artwork Discussion

Muñoz’s Maquila Región 4 reimagines factory production through a mobile, participatory model. By combining electronic components with textile traditions, she exposes the realities of outsourced labor in global technology manufacturing. Her work critiques economic systems that depend on women’s labor while rendering those workers invisible, and proposes alternative, more ethical models of technological production.


Tania Candiani

Short Bio

Tania Candiani is a Mexican artist whose work explores sound, machines, and historical technologies. She frequently reactivates obsolete or overlooked mechanical systems.

Technology & Artwork Discussion

Candiani’s work engages with the material history of machines and the people who operated them. By revisiting analog technologies and industrial processes, she challenges linear narratives of technological “progress.” Her practice emphasizes how technological systems are shaped by cultural values, labor, and gender, aligning closely with feminist critiques of industrial and digital infrastructures.

Docent Conversations

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