Katherine Sherwood
Artworks
After Ingres, 2014. Acrylic and mixed media on recycled linen. From the Venuses of the Yelling Clinic series. Courtesy of the artist and Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
Audio description
Other works in the exhibition
Neuron Nurse, 2010. Latex paint, digital prints, and fabric. From the Healers of the Yelling Clinic series. Courtesy of the artist and Anglim/Trimble, San Francisco, CA.
Audio description
Dr Speech, 2010. Latex paint, linen, and embroidered seals. From the Healers of the Yelling Clinic series. Courtesy of the artist and George Adams Gallery, New York.
Audio description
After Ingres is from a series called the Venuses of the Yelling Clinic, while Neuron Nurse and Dr Speech are from the Healers of the Yelling Clinic series. Katherine Sherwood founded the Yelling Clinic with Sunaura Taylor at UC Berkeley as a collective of artists with disabilities who aim to spread awareness on disability and art therapy, with a focus on the intersections between war and disability. Sherwood playfully challenges us to consider our role and our bias by subverting established art historical conventions, and weaves in questions of staring and looking.
In the Healers series, she frequently uses imagery from medical brain illustrations by Santiago Ramon y Cajal, who won the Nobel prize in 1906 and always wanted to be an artist but was pushed into medicine by his father. In the Venus series, we are prompted to notice our role as onlookers. As we stare at and judge the female (and the disabled) body, are we seeing through the “male gaze” or valuing difference and fragility? After Ingres is based on the 1814 painting Grande Odalisque by Dominique Ingres.
About the Artist
“At around 25 years of age I started realizing that making art made me exceedingly happy. That’s been the case ever since ... I was so happy to merely change hands after I had the stroke instead of giving up my avocation.”—Katherine Sherwood
Katherine Sherwood found a new way of working after a serious stroke in the Spring of 1977 at the age of 44. By switching to her left hand during her recovery, she continued to paint but now with ready-mixed pigment and using larger canvases that were easier to handle. She says: “I think when you experience something so absolutely life altering as a cerebral hemorrhage you see that, 'okay, I wasn’t in control.' And what’s happening is not just the conscious person inside of me. Once you give up any notion of control, then I think life goes a lot easier. That’s what I’ve experienced.”
Katherine Sherwood was born in New Orleans, LA, and educated at UC Davis and the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work is collected by major institutions, and she exhibited at the Whitney Biennial in 2000. Sherwood was a Professor of Art History and Art Practice at the University of California, Berkeley, for 30 years and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2020. In 2021 she joined the board of Creative Growth.