Location: Rodeo, CA
Medium: Painting, collage
Website: katherinesherwood.com
Katherine Sherwood was born in 1952 in New Orleans, Louisiana, and moved to California as a child. She earned a BA in art history from the University of California, Davis in 1975, studying under painter Mike Henderson, and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1979. Her early work grew out of the Bay Area punk scene and East Village counterculture, producing figurative paintings on themes of Catholic iconography, gender, and sex work, including the Aggressive Women series begun in 1978. She showed at Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco starting in 1982 before spending time in New York.
In 1990 Sherwood joined the faculty of UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice, where she taught painting and drawing for more than two decades, retiring in 2016. In 1997, at age 44, she suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage that paralyzed the right side of her body and altered her speech and cognition. She taught herself to paint left-handed, and the recovery reshaped both her practice and her public role: she developed UC Berkeley courses including “Art, Medicine and Disability” and “Art and Meditation,” helped expand the campus’s Disability Studies program, and co-founded the art and disability collective The Yelling Clinic with artist Sunaura Taylor.
Sherwood has received an NEA Artist Fellowship (1989), the Adaline Kent Award (1999), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (1998), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2005), a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant (2006), and a Wynn Newhouse Award. In 2020 she received an honorary doctorate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2000, and she is Professor Emerita at UC Berkeley. She lives and works in Rodeo, California.
Since her stroke, Sherwood’s paintings have centered on cerebral angiograms and MRI scans of her own brain, which she collages and paints into compositions that pull from art-historical genres — reclining Venuses and odalisques, Dutch and Italian vanitas still lifes, devotional imagery — recast through the lens of disability. Her Venuses series reworks the classical female nude as a disabled body, crowned with brain imagery in place of hair; her Brain Flowers series paints directly onto the worn reverse sides of found art-historical prints, replacing blooming flowers with angiograms in a contemporary twist on vanitas symbolism. Working left-handed since 1997, she favors a gestural, poured, and layered application of paint, often on repurposed textiles or antique paper.
Her project The Healers of the Yelling Clinic extends this practice into constructed figures built from textiles and brain-scan imagery, tying her formal concerns directly to disability rights activism. Across these bodies of work, Sherwood treats her own medical imaging not as illness but as material — a way of writing disabled and female bodies back into a canon that historically excluded them.
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