GIVE US MOM!!!

Nora Turato is best known for her interdisciplinary work that examines the overwhelming use and consumption of language in contemporary society. A trained graphic designer, she works with text as both subject and material, collecting phrases and vernacular from a wide range of sources, including social media, advertisements, media headlines, literature, and everyday conversations. Turato refers to this accumulation as a form of “linguistic soup,” which she edits, recomposes, and activates across performances, installations, paintings, and artist books. Through bold typographic decisions laid against solid colors, Turato reveals how today’s language can feel compulsive, funny, abrasive, and emotionally charged all at once. By amplifying and reframing the language that saturates daily life, she exposes the anxieties, contradictions, and desires embedded in contemporary communication, capturing how language both connects and isolates us in an age of information overload.

For the High Line, Turato presents GIVE US MOM!!!!, a new work that channels an urgent collective plea for nurturing and protection. The text “GIVE US MOM!!!” appears in bright yellow letters set against a flat blue background. The phrase invokes the figure of the “mom” as a symbol of softness and care within a world driven by speed, distraction, and spectacle. The use of Comic Sans, a font often derided for being childish, further reinforces the sincerity of the billboard’s plea. Drawing on the visual language of advertising billboards, while subverting their typical sleek, authoritative voice, GIVE US MOM!!! reclaims strategies of mass communication to deliver a disarmingly direct appeal for tenderness and kinship.