Niki Grangruth is an artist and photographer working in Chicago, IL. Her current body of work, title The New Madonnas, explores the relationships between mothers and their children. These relationships are constructed of a series of juxtapositions including reliance and independence, intimacy and disengament and reality and fiction. They are inspired by the pervasiveness of a historically-formed maternal ideal. She uses poses, gestures and compositions from traditional paintings of the Madonna and Child, but situates them in contemporary domestic situations.