BIO
Angela Hennessy is an Oakland based artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts where teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death in contemporary art. Through writing, studio work, and performance, her practice questions assumptions about Death and the Dead themselves. She uses a spectrum of color and other phenomena of light to expose mythologies of identity. Ephemeral and celestial forms are constructed by every day gestures of domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, weaving, brushing, and braiding.
Her work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, The New Yorker, Nat Brut, Surface Design Journal, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture and recently in exhibitions at The Museum of the African Diaspora, pt. 2 Gallery, and Southern Exposure. She has received awards from Artadia, Svane Family Foundation, Aninstantia Foundation and Joan Mitchell Foundation.
In 2015, she survived a gunshot wound while interrupting a violent assault on the street in front of her house. Alternating between poem, prayer, and call to action, her manifesto, The School of the Dead, was written in the following months of recovery.
As a hospice volunteer, she has worked with families on home funerals, death vigils, and grief rituals. She is certified in the Grief Recovery Method and trained with Final Passages and the International End of Life Doula Association. She serves on the advisory boards of Recompose and Death Salon. She lectures and teaches workshops on the aesthetic and social practices that mediate the boundary between the living and the dead.
CV
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
As I Live and Breathe - SOMArts - San Francisco, CA - 2022
Queenship - pt.2 Gallery - Oakland, CA - 2021
Everyone Loves the Sunshine - Museum of the African Diaspora - San Francisco, CA 2019
When and Where I Enter - Southern Exposure - 2017
SELECT EXHIBITIONS
Color Code - McEvoy Foundation - 2022
Hella Feminist - Oakland Museum of California - 2022
Choreographies of Disclosure, ProArts Gallery, Oakland, CA - 2019
Passed By This Way, Patricia Sweetow Gallery, San Francisco, CA - 2018
Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, Oakland, CA - 2018
The Black Woman Is God, SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco, CA - 2018
Cult Exhibitions, San Francisco, CA - 2018
BLACK HO(L)ES, The Growlery, San Francisco, CA - 2018
Radical Beauty, Alameda Windows Project/Art Walk, Alameda, CA - 2018
Object Action: F Word, State Gallery, San Francisco, CA - 2018
AWARDS
Joan Mitchell Foundation - 2022
Artadia - 2019
Svane Family Foundation - 2021
Aninstantia Foundation
RESIDENCIES
Meta Open Arts - 2020