Katherine Sherwood

Venuses of the Yelling Clinic, 2013 - PResent

Katherine Sherwood's Venuses of the Yelling Clinic series (2013-2022) reinterprets canonical paintings of female nudes through the lens of disability and intersectional feminism.

“I appropriated art-historical images of the female nude in order to challenge ideals of beauty and to insert disability into them. This work is painted on the back of Art History reproductions made in 1950-1963 that are tied together with linen strips glued to the front side to create a large quilted painting surface. The images on the reproduction prints are primarily Western paintings and drawings that were used as educational tools in the Art Practice department at UC Berkeley. The backs are quite beautiful; they have handwritten labels with the artists’ names, location where they were made, the century, and catalog numbers. They are worn, a bit yellowed, and show evidence of repeated use.”

– Katherine Sherwood, Garden of the Yelling Clinic (catalog), 2022

The first painting in this series reimagines Manet’s Olympia (1863), a prototypical and complex symbol of female subjectivity and empowerment. In Sherwood's version, Olympia’s famously challenging gaze is replaced with an MRI of the artist’s own brain - a medical image that reflects her experience with disability after a cerebral hemorrhage. Olympia wears the same leg brace that Sherwood uses to assist in her mobility, compelling viewers to confront ableist conceptions of beauty and well-being, and celebrate the uncompromising presence of strong, proud women with disabilities.