Katherine Sherwood

Acclaimed mixed-media paintings investigate the point at which the essential aspects of art, medicine, and disability intersect. The interdisciplinary relevance of her work has led to her recent participation in “Visionary Anatomies” at the National Academy of Science in Washington DC, “Inside Out Loud: Visualizing Women’s Health in Contemporary Art” at the Kemper Museum in St. Louis and “Human Being” at the Chicago Cultural Center. She co-curated the exhibition “Blind at the Museum” at the Berkeley Art Museum, and organized an accompanying conference at UC Berkeley, where she is also a professor in the Art Department. Sherwood’s work was exhibited in the 2000 Whitney Biennial and at Yerba Buena Art Center in 2003. Recent solo exhibitions include Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, Locks Gallery in Philadelphia, Cole Pratt Gallery in New Orleans, and Michael Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles.

Student Review:
by Amanda Cachia

I was quite thrilled that Katherine had accepted the VCS invitation to participate in the Forum series as I had put forward her name earlier in the spring as a suggestion for guest speakers. I was equally thrilled to introduce Katherine given how important she has been to my curatorial and academic work in disability art and culture since my time at CCA and in the Bay Area. She has been a kind, supportive, generous mentor and friend and is deeply passionate about her work, unswervingly committed and loyal to her cause. I am incredibly inspired by her strength, grace and integrity and her boundless energy and dynamism within the disability community. For all these reasons, Katherine is deeply cherished by her past and current students, colleagues and especially me. I began by introducing Katherine to the assembled group in the Board Room rather unconventionally. I wanted them to see Katherine’s speech at a UC Berkeley rally and strike on September 24, 2009 on YouTube. This clip really demonstrated Katherine’s powerhouse personality as a disability rights advocate and one whose passion spans beyond her own art practice and impacts the disability community across the country. The message that resonated and came loud and clear from her speech was that disabled people should be and can be included in any activity and in any organization as much as the next non-disabled person: “Yes, Yes, Yes!”

Katherine’s talk was divided into three sections. She began with a detailed overview of her artistic practice, including the story of her stroke and how her disability became incorporated into her paintings. After one hour of discussing her practice, Katherine began to talk about the work made by artists in the Yelling Clinic. The Yelling Clinic is an art and disability collective and their aim is to further global disability studies by researching military pollution and its affect on the disabled population.  In December she will work with disabled artisans in Hue, Vietnam with other members from the collective. The last part of Katherine’s talk was presenting a segment from her new film which she directed and produced entitled “Create: The Artists are Present.” This film was based on a reaction to an exhibition of the same name held at the Berkeley Art Museum in the fall, curated by Larry Rinder and Matthew Higgs. The exhibition included art made by intellectually disabled artists active in the three disability art service centers in the Bay Area, Creative Growth in Oakland, National Institute for Artists with Disabilities (NIAD) in Richmond and Creativity Explored in San Francisco. Katherine and a group of physically disabled artists in the Bay Area were disappointed and angered that the curators of this show failed to incorporate the artists’ “voices” into the show. In other words, despite traditional curatorial practice, these artists were not interviewed. The curators attributed this to an inability to speak to the artists as they were uncommunicative, which revealed a very prejudiced and limited perception by the curators. Katherine’s reaction was to develop a film in which the “Create” artists were interviewed by physically disabled artists Neil Marcus, Sunny Taylor and herself. The film premiered at a “Create”-related event at the Berkeley Art Museum and is now under consideration to be included in the tour of “Create” across the country. Despite many of the artists being unable to communicate in typical verbal forms, they were able to communicate in other ways that were just as valid and worthy of viewer attention.

Several questions were posed to Katherine at the conclusion of her talk, including more detail on her artwork, and how her work and her stroke experience has influenced her teaching at UC Berkeley in the Department of Art Practice. From my own perspective, while I felt that Katherine’s talk on her own practice was very full and satisfactory, I wasn’t quite sure why Katherine presented the art by the artists in the Yelling Clinic collective. I would have preferred more information on the objectives and vision of the Yelling Clinic as a collective and their plans for their journey to Vietnam. While I was able to ascertain more of this information during my own line of questioning for Katherine, I think this would have been more relevant to discuss in the body of her talk, rather than simply seeing a slideshow of art. Finally, while I enjoyed watching a clip from Katherine’s new film, she failed to follow this up with a more detailed description of the context for this film. I had sent out via Google docs Katherine’s letter of protest to Larry Rinder for the VCS community to read before Katherine’s talk, so that audience members entered her talk with some background, but more critical analysis on the outcome of this film would have been potentially interesting for an audience that were largely unfamiliar with disability rights. At the conclusion of the Q & A, Katherine read out her response letter to an editor who had rejected a written piece she had developed about her art practice for possible publication in his journal (which I had also circulated via Google docs – it turns out this was a mistake, as Katherine was very self-conscious about repeating herself in the talk – a concern that I don’t think really made an impact). Her message was simple and direct: “Fuck you.” And that is how I wrapped up Katherine’s talk, somewhat appropriately given the identity politics emanating from her strong words and images.