Katherine Sherwood

Katherine Sherwood is an American artist living and working in the San Francisco Bay Area, California who is known for paintings that explore disability, feminism, and healing, and for her teaching and disability rights activism at the Department of Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley.[1][2][3][4][5][6]

Katherine Sherwood
Born1952 (age 70–71)
New Orleans, USA
NationalityAmerican
EducationUniversity of California, Davis; San Francisco Art Institute
Websitewww.katherinesherwood.com

Early life and education

Katherine Sherwood was born in 1952 in New Orleans, Louisiana. After the early death of her father and remarriage of her mother, her family relocated to California, where she attended a Catholic high school. She received a B.A. in Art History in 1975 from the University of California, Davis, where she studied art with painter Mike Henderson, and an M.F.A. in 1979 from San Francisco Art Institute.[7]

Career

After graduating from UC Davis, Sherwood lived in San Francisco, California, and was involved in the Bay Area punk scene. She created irreverent, crudely figurative paintings that appropriated Catholic iconography, including the Aggressive Women series (1978–82) that made use of junk shop frames and depicted Catholic female martyrs and sex workers. She had her first solo exhibition at Gallery Paule Anglim in 1982, the beginning of a lifelong relationship with the gallery.

After moving to New York, where she was involved with the East Village art, punk, and countercultural scene, Sherwood continued to exhibit work with themes including gender, technology, religious iconography, and medical imaging.[8] In 1990, she was hired as a tenure-track professor by the University of California, Berkeley Department of Art Practice, where she taught painting alongside colleagues Joan Brown and Wendy Sussman.[9]

In 1997, at the age of 44, she had a massive stroke – a cerebral hemorrhage – which paralysed the right side of her body, and affected her cognition and speech.[10][11] Teaching herself to paint again was essential to her healing process. Paintings from this period incorporated images of cerebral angiograms of her own brain[12][13][14] and magical healing symbols from the Lemegeton.[15] These paintings used colorful abstract passages of poured paint with intentional craquelure.[16] Sherwood had been using images of the brain in her work as early as 1991, and said of her stroke that it was when “my life caught up to my art”.[17][18][19][20] She gained national attention with the publication of an article on the cover of the Wall Street Journal in 2000[21] and inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, also in 2000.[22]

Disability art

As she redeveloped her approach to painting, her work became an extension of her disability rights activism.[23] At UC Berkeley, she developed a course “Art and Disability,” and became active in the disability studies program. She wrote and spoke widely about her personal experience with disability and would later go on to be on the board of Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland, an organization that supports artists with developmental disabilities.[7] Sherwood is critical of the way her story is framed in the media as an “overcoming narrative.” She sees her disability as a valuable part of who she is, not a disadvantage to be overcome.[24]

Beginning in 2010, Sherwood began a new body of figurative work with collaged MRIs that explicitly addressed disability.[25] The “Venus” series (2013–22) appropriates well-known images of reclining female nudes painted on the reverse sides of posters of canonical works of Western art history. Sherwood renders them as proud, disabled women with prosthetics or assistive technologies.[26] The “Brain Flowers” series (2014–22) makes use of imagery from the vanitas paintings of 17th century Dutch and other European women painters, including Rachel Ruysch, Maria van Oosterwijck, Josefa de Óbidos, Maria Sibylla Merian, and others, both garnering attention for these now underrecognized women painters and using the symbolic language of vanitas paintings to address disability and mortality.[7]

Collections

Katherine Sherwood’s work is housed in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;[27] the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive;[28][29] the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco;[30] the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the San Jose Museum of Art;[31] the De Young Museum,[32] San Francisco; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Palm Springs Art Museum, the National Academy of Sciences,[33] Washington DC; the U.S. Department of State,[34] Washington DC; Microsoft Corporation,[35] Redmond, Washington; and the Ford Foundation, New York, among other public and private collections.

Recognition

Sherwood received an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020;[36] a Wynn Newhouse Award in 2012,[37] a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 2006,[38] a Guggenheim Fellowship Award in 2005,[39] an Adaline Kent Award from San Francisco Art Institute in 1999,[40] a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant in 1998, an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant in 1997, and a National Endowment for the Arts Artist Fellowship in 1989.[41]

References
  1. Sohn, Emily (15 March 2014). "After Brain Damage, the Creative Juices Flow for Some". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  2. Wigmore, Barry (3 July 2000). "Stroke of Genius". The London Times.
  3. Neuroskeptic (15 April 2012). "How A Stroke Changed Katherine Sherwood's Art". No. April 2012. Discover Magazine. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  4. Marech, Rona (31 August 2001). "Stroke of Luck: Debilitating illness changes flow of UC professor's artwork". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  5. Hom, Kathleen (5 February 2008). "A Disabled Artist Gets inside Her Own Head". Washington Post.
  6. MacCosh, Doug (26 October 2002). "Hands of Fate". Times-Picayune, New Orleans.
  7. Katherine Sherwood: In the Garden of the Yelling Clinic. George Adams, Anglim Trimble, Walter Maciel. pp. 35–36. ISBN 978-0-984986941.
  8. Vogel, Carol (8 December 1999). "Choosing a Palette Of Biennial Artists; Surprises in the Whitney's Selections". The New York Times. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  9. Whittaker, Richard (2002). "A Conversation with Katherine Sherwood". Works and Conversations. 6.
  10. Mayo, Jenny (14 January 2008). "Tragedy to Triumph". Washington Times.
  11. Lyndon, Lyndon (3 December 2001). "A Near Brush". People Magazine.
  12. Fountain, Henry (19 April 2005). "What Leonardo Could Have Done With a Cat Scan". The New York TImes. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  13. Jablow, Paul (18 October 2010). "Study Of Brain Injury Hints at Roots of Creativity". Philadelphia Inquirer.
  14. Beeler, Monique (10 January 2002). "Neuroesthetics conference: This is your brain on art". The Oakland Tribune.
  15. Chatterjee, Anjan (2007). Apoplexy and Personhood in Katherine Sherwood’s Paintings. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. pp. 44–52.
  16. Lee, Sasha (October 2008). "Interview: Katherine Sherwood". Beautiful Decay Magazine.
  17. Kleege, Georgina (2007). Brain Work: A Meditation on the Painting of Katherine Sherwood. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences. pp. 8–18.
  18. Emerling, Susan (28 April 2002). "Her Life Caught up with Her Work". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  19. Derby, John; Wexler, Alice (2019). Contemporary Art and Disability Studies. Routledge Press. ISBN 9781032337456.
  20. Fraser, Lynne (17 June 2008). "The Private and Public Nature of Disease: Art as a Transformative Medium". Canadian Medical Association Journal. 178 (13).
  21. Waldman, Peter (12 May 2000). "Tragedy Turns a Right-Handed Artist Into a Lefty – and a Star in Art World". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  22. Kimmelman, Michael (24 March 2000). "A New Whitney Team Makes Its Biennial Pitch". The New York TImes.
  23. Goldman, Edward (17 April 2018). "Beauty and the Brain". KCRW Arts. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  24. Sherwood, Katherine (3 April 2012). "How a cerebral hemorrhage altered my art". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 6 (55): 55. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2012.00055. PMC 3318229. PMID 22493572.
  25. Michno, Christopher (1 May 2018). "Katherine Sherwood". Artillery Magazine. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  26. Mizota, Sharon (2 April 2018). "In Katherine Sherwood's Nude Paintings Disability and Race Enter the Picture". The Los Angeles Times. Retrieved 24 September 2022.
  27. "Katherine Sherwood: Works in the Collection". SFMOMA. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  28. "Art Collection: Sallos II". Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. UC Berkeley. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  29. "Art Collection: Buer/Cures". Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. UC Berkeley. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  30. "Naberius". Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  31. "Katherine Sherwood". San José Museum of Art. San José Museum of Art. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  32. "Knock Your Block Off". Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  33. "Katherine Sherwood: Golgi's Door". National Academies. National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  34. "Art in Embassies: Katherine Sherwood". U.S. Department of State. U.S. Department of State. Retrieved 2 December 2022.
  35. Adams, Edie (2012). Microsoft Art Collection: 25 Years Of Celebrating Creativity And Inspiring Innovation. Microsoft Corporation. ISBN 978-061564934-4.
  36. "The School of the Art Institute of Chicago to Honor Citizen Artists Mel Chin, AFRICOBRA, and Katherine Sherwood at Its 2020 Commencement Ceremony". School of the Art Institute of Chicago. SAIC. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  37. "Wynn Newhouse Awards: Katherine Sherwood". Wynn Newhouse Awards. Wynn Newhouse Awards. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  38. "Katherine Sherwood, Rodeo, California". Joan Mitchell Foundation. Joan Mitchell Foundation. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  39. "Katherine Sherwood". John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
  40. Katherine Sherwood: 1999 Adaline Kent Award exhibition. San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Art Institute. 1999. ISBN 0930495349.
  41. Frohnmayer, John. "National Endowment for the Arts 1989 Annual Report" (PDF). National Endowment for the Arts. Office of Public Affairs. Retrieved 30 November 2022.
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