I was delighted to have been asked by painter Katherine Sherwood and her gallerists, George Adams, Walter Maciel, and Shannon Trimble, to write an essay for the new catalog, Katherine Sherwood: In the Garden of the Yelling Clinic, which has just been published.
Cover of Katherine Sherwood: In the Garden of the Yelling Clinic (2022), featuring the painting After Ingres (2014). Mixed media on found cotton duck, 84 x 105 inches.
A new catalogue surveying Katherine Sherwood’s most recent series of paintings. With an introduction by Walter Maciel and essays by Katherine Sherwood, Ginny Treanor and Farley Gwazda.
The catalogue covers the development of Sherwood’s ongoing Venuses of the Yelling Clinic series, begun in 2013 and the subsequent Brain Flowers and Pandemic Madonna works, all of which reconsider art-historical precedent through the lenses of feminism and Sherwood’s own disability. With over 40 illustrations, including archival images of some of Sherwood’s early feminist works, two scholarly essays and a personal reflection by the artist herself, the catalogue is the most comprehensive examination of Sherwood’s career to date.
Softcover | 64 pages | 42 illustrations | 8 x 10 inches
$35 - online or in person at Sherwood’s galleries.
My essay explores the development of Sherwood’s earliest work and reveals that she has long been working with the themes and imagery featured in her newest large-scale figurative and floral paintings. My goal is to counter the ways that, as a disabled artist, Sherwood has often been presented in the media as an example of an “overcoming narrative” - an ableist trope that devalues the experience of people with disabilities.
This essay was made possible through the work I’ve been doing with Katherine Sherwood in her studio, which included finding a half-forgotten box of slides of her earliest paintings. Having previously curated a small retrospective exhibition of Sherwood’s work at the Worth Ryder Art Gallery at UC Berkeley, I was inspired to record the history of this less well-known but germinal period of her practice. In addition to the essay, this work resulted in a new history section of her website.
