[7] After graduating from UC Davis, Sherwood lived in San Francisco, California, and was involved in the Bay Area punk scene.
After moving to New York, where she was involved with the East Village art, punk, and countercultural scene, Sherwood continued to exhibit work with themes including gender, technology, religious iconography, and medical imaging.
[8] In 1990, she was hired as a tenure-track professor by the University of California, Berkeley Department of Art Practice, where she taught painting alongside colleagues Joan Brown and Wendy Sussman.
[25] The “Venus” series (2013–22) appropriates well-known images of reclining female nudes painted on the reverse sides of posters of canonical works of Western art history.
[26] The “Brain Flowers” series (2014–22) makes use of imagery from the vanitas paintings of 17th century Dutch and other European women painters, including Rachel Ruysch, Maria van Oosterwijck, Josefa de Óbidos, Maria Sibylla Merian, and others, both garnering attention for these now underrecognized women painters and using the symbolic language of vanitas paintings to address disability and mortality.