Born 1977 in New York, NY. Lives in Copake, NY.
(SHE/HER/HERS)
Dana Sherwood is a multimedia artist who examines the expansive topic of the Anthropocene. She is best known for preparing elaborate banquets and cakes for local wildlife, the consumption of which she documents with covert video footage and fanciful watercolors. Sherwood’s work creatively examines the complex and intimate relationship between humans and other animals in an increasingly homogenized ecosystem, one which is threatened by climate change and development.
Dana Sherwood received her BFA from the University of Maine, Farmington. Her recent solo exhibitions include Some Kind of Tea Party or Thereabouts in the Realm of Madness at UMass Dartmouth, (Dartmouth, MA), The Cake Eaters at Denny Dimin Gallery (New York, NY), Dana Sherwood: Animal Appetites and Other Encounters in Wildness at Florence Griswold Museum (Old Lyme, CT), Horses for the Trees at Denny Dimin Gallery (New York, NY) and Feral Cakes at Kepler Art Conseil, Galerie de l’Angle (Paris, France) among others. Her work has been included in exhibitions at dOCUMENTA 13 (Kassel, Germany), MASS MoCA (North Adams, MA), Storm King Art Center (New Windsor, NY), Jack Shainman Gallery (New York, NY), Nassau County Museum of Art (Roslyn, NY), Flux Factory (New York, NY), Socrates Sculpture Park (New York, NY), The Pit (Glendale, CA), Tanya Bonakdar Gallery (New York, NY), and Marianne Boesky Gallery (New York, NY). Sherwood has received several prestigious residencies including Swing Space by LMCC, Pilchuck Glass School, and OMI International Arts Center. Her work has been featured and reviewed in publications including The New York Times, Forbes, Hyperallergic, Surface, The Village Voice, Food & Wine, The Huffington Post, Art F City, and the Miami Rail. Dana Sherwood is represented by Denny Gallery (New York).
Multiple artworks by Dana Sherwood were acquired by the Florence Griswold Museum in Old Lyme, CT following her survey exhibition Animal Appetites and Other Encounters in Wildness which closed September 18th. (Photo: Paul Mutino)
Dana Sherwood’s Solo Museum Exhibition at Florence Griswold Museum.
Sherwood discusses her current show ‘The Cake Eaters.’ Talking about what you see in the show, where the ideas came from and the many previous projects and travels that have allowed the work to evolve.
“I don’t really believe in didacticism in art—I think that’s horrible,” she says. What she seeks out instead are ways to intrigue and provoke, which in her case often begin with imagery related to food… “They are kind of hypnotic—I made these porcelain and gold leaf cake stands for each one.”
Dana Sherwood’s strange feminist fantasias, drawings and paintings of naked women posed, along with idyllic living-room sets, in the bellies of enormous animals [deserve mention].
A round-up of this year’s best outdoor sculpture exhibitions.
“The same way I want to draw the animals in by enticing them with meatballs, I also want to draw people in by enticing them with the wonder of watching a raccoon tea party.”
As we peer into these night visions through Sherwood’s lens, her other-worldly sets and confections invite us into another reality. Through her patient and humorous overtures, the animals reveal themselves. The creatures upend our notions of order as they wash their paws in teacups and walk on the table. They surprise us.
10 More Recipes From Artists Who Are Getting Creative in the Kitchen to Spice Up Dining in the Era of Social Distancing.
The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, “If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand him.”
From the pocket of a white denim jacket in the back of Denny Dimin Gallery, Dana Sherwood pulls out a rock. Not just any rock, though: she’d picked this one up while visiting the Gobi Desert. Shortly after, she took it to a Mongolian shaman, who blessed it and handed it back to her as a sort of talisman.
For her stunning new series of paintings, New York artist Dana Sherwood centres on her experience of living and working amongst nomadic tribes in Mongolia.
A collaboration of Mark Dion and his wife Dana Sherwood, Confectionery Curiosities (2008/2019) is a highlight of Mark Dion: Follies, on view through November 11. The first exhibition to display Dion’s folly works as a major survey is an exploration of the artist’s creative interpretation of architectural folly since the mid-1990s.
By: Florence Fabricant
Food and eating figure into some of the whimsical interactive works by the American artist Mark Dion that now dot the Storm King Art Center’s more than 500 acres and museum in the Hudson Valley.
IN THE PHOTOGRAPH, 16 raw yolks sit in a plastic ice-cube tray, each compartment brimming with albumen. Around the tray lie broken eggshells, cast off on a dimensionless blue surface. As a composition, it’s simple and striking, with saturated Jolly Rancher colors, the kind of image that pops on Instagram. But it doesn’t tell the story we’ve come to expect from food photographs that dominate social media: There’s no teasing promise of deliciousness or even edibility. The yolks are sunshine-yellow…Read More
Dana Sherwood is In Wild Air Volume V | Edition LVIII Made by Heath Killen View on In Wild Air Dana Sherwood is In Wild Air Dana Sherwood is a New York based artist whose work explores contact between human and non-human animals in order to understand culture and behavior. Her sculptures, videos, and watercolors portray ritualized feedings Sherwood creates for animals who live on the frontiers of human civilization. She experiments night after night serving them decadent cakes, sculpted…Read More
Will Work With Food By Kevin West Printed in December Issue Posted on December 08, 2017 Read on Surface. …Dana Sherwood stretches food-based identity to its furthest limit—as the defining activity of the species Homo sapiens—and keeps going. Inspired by 19th-century illustrated cooking encyclopedias, 1960s Jell-O molds, and the writing of Claude Levi-Strauss, the New York–based artist creates feasts not intended for human consumption. Instead, Sherwood composes her outdoor banquets, turns on a nighttime infrared surveillance camera, and heads inside….Read More
10 Emerging Artists to Discover at Untitled, Miami Beach By Scott Indrisek Dec 5, 2017 Read on Artsy Untitled returned for its sixth edition in Miami on Tuesday, its stylish tent set up mere feet from the waves crashing onto South Beach. The fair continues to hone its status as a go-to stop for savvy collectors, especially those whose budget might max out at $10,000. Artsy hit the booths on preview day to scout the works that you’ll want to…Read More
Treats, Jewelry and AstroTurf: Scenes From an Art Show for Dogs By JOSHUA BARONE Photographs by KRISTA SCHLUETER Produced by LAURA O’NEILL AUGUST 11, 2017 Read in The New York Times. Could a pioneering art show for dogs — supposedly organized by a dog — be called anything other than Dogumenta? The idea came from the art critic Jessica Dawson, whose rescue dog, Rocky, often accompanies her on trips to galleries. “I was surprised to see that Rocky…Read More
In Conversation: Mark Dion & Dana Sherwood Friday, February 19th from 6:45-8pm NeueHouse Madison Square | 110 East 25th Street Mark Dion and Dana Sherwood are both artists who work around issue of the culture of nature. While each have an independent practice, they also collaborate with each other. This talk, organized in partnership with Gladstone Gallery, will highlight their global practice featuring works across four continents, with Dion speaking about works like “The Wonder Workshop”, produced during the most…Read More
“An Artist Serves Up Decadent Feasts for Wild Animals” by Allison Meier, February 1, 2016 Read on Hyperallergic Over the past few years, New York-based artist Dana Sherwood has organized a picnic for wild baboons on the South African coast, left banquets for raccoons in the suburbs of South Florida, and concocted a molded terrine of jellied spam, beef, hot dogs, and marrow bones for coyotes. Most recently, she made elaborate confections of meat, fish, and local produce for ocelots,…Read More
STRAIGHT TALK with Dana Sherwood View PDF of article. Dana Sherwood is a New York–based artist who blurs the line between the domestic and the wild through her mixed media and documentary art. Concerned with “the semiotics of desire and melancholia present at the intersection of the two worlds,” Sherwood’s work explores novel ideas such as what it means, and what it looks like, to create a picnic basket for South African baboons. Sherwood has exhibited internationally including at New York’s Marianne Boesky Gallery, Mixed Greens Gallery, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Flux Factory as…Read More
NEW YORK – DANA SHERWOOD: “CROSSING THE WILD LINE” AT DENNY GALLERY THROUGH FEBRUARY 21ST, 2016 By J. Holburn, January 20th, 2016 Read on Art Observed Dana Sherwood’s conceptual focus is the Anthropocene, a contentious term which in essence describes our present and future epoch, framed by the destabilization of nature as impacted by human activity on earth. With a practice that spans drawing, video, and sculptural installations, her work intervenes to engage local wildlife and open up a realm…Read More
New LES Art Exhibit Re-Examines ‘Nature’ in Human-Shaped World By Savannah Cox, January 13, 2016 Read on DNAinfo. From hanging out in the Mets’ weight room to “invading” the backyards of South Park Sloperesidents, raccoons have been getting a lot of press lately. Many consider the increased presence of these charcoal-eyed creatures to be an annoyance, but Washington Heights artist Dana Sherwood views them as signs of something else: the Anthropocene. The term refers to the era that some scientists…Read More
“Art Made by Tempting Animals” by Kat Herriman New York Times, January 12, 2016 At the artist Dana Sherwood’s apartment on the Upper West Side, her dog, Hera, answers the door, tail wagging. A lifelong equestrian who now competes in dressage, Sherwood is used to collaborating with animals — and connects with them on a fundamental level. “Dressage is all about understanding a horse through the feel of your body; it’s like inventing another language,” says Sherwood. “What I’m…Read More
The Artist Who Lured an Ocelot to Dinner by Rachel Corbett Food & Wine, January 7, 2016 Dana Sherwood creates sculpture-like meals to entice wild animals, then illustrates her dinner guests. A few months ago, Dana Sherwood went shopping for a dinner party. On her list were pigs’ tails, a three-foot ox liver, a whole chicken and mangoes. She spent a week preparing an al fresco feast including carne de sol and traditional Brazilian street meats. Then, on the appointed…Read More
Read on Art F City This Week’s Must-See Art Events: Gallery Armageddon By Paddy Johnson, Michael Anthony Farley, Rea McNamara on January 4, 2016 Those who thought they’d ease into the work week after the holiday break will be sorely disappointed. Nearly every gallery in the city has an opening. Between the Abrons Art Center’s American Realness Festival opening this week and a rash of Chelsea and Lower East Side shows, your calendar will be full. And not just with…Read More
Sight Equus Mongolia was installed inside a large installation in the form of a tent inspired by Sherwood’s recent research in Mongolia exploring herding culture and Shamanism. The video and installation were included in Sherwood’s exhibition Horses for the Trees at Denny Dimin Gallery from November 1 to December 21, 2019.
Sight Equus Mongolia, 2019
Digital Video
5 min 22 sec
Edition of 3 + 2 APs
Digital Video, 11:22 mins
Residing deep within the suburban sprawl of South Florida, I began setting out fruits, vegetables, meats, cakes and other confectionery concoctions for the local animal inhabitants. The menus grew from a knowledge of the natural diet of animals such as raccoons, foxes, possums and other creatures I expected to find living along the borders of human habitation. Filming over the days, weeks and months I began to get to know the preferences and predilections of their régimes, and, usually these foods did not include green vegetables and apples, but donuts, hot dogs, pizza and lamb chops. A conversation started to emerge as I watched my videos each morning from the previous nights banquet and adjusted, tweaked and tested them. – Dana Sherwood Feral Cakes was first exhitbied at Kepler Art Conseil in Paris, France from September 26 to October 21, 2017 it was then brought to Untitled Miami Beach by Denny Gallery in December 2017.
The Wild and the Tame was installed in Dana Sherwood’s exhibition Crossing the Wild Line at Denny Gallery from January 10 to February 21, 2016.
The Wild and the Tame, 2015
Digital video
7:02 Minutes
