-Before the stroke I would just roll my eyes when I would hear about healing in art.

When it came down to it, that was so much a part of my particular journey and my particular way of healing.

I'm Katherine Sherwood and I'm an artist with a disability.

-Katherine Sherwood is an artist who is based in the Bay Area.

In the 1980s and 90s she was creating very raw, figurative, feminist paintings.

In the middle of her career at age 44, she had a cerebral hemorrhage that left her paralyzed on the right side of her body.

She had to relearn to paint with her non-dominant hand and actually got a lot of attention for the paintings that she was creating at this time.

-I never for a moment doubted that I would do art again.

I consider myself very lucky that I merely had to change hands.

I often think, "Oh, if I was a violinist I would be really messed up."

-In making selections for the show, we focused on artists who are responding to moments of illness or disability in their lives.

We have over 80 artists in this show, so it is really an intergenerational exhibition of artists who are in dialogue with one another across decades.

We were thinking about artists really in the 21st century who have begun to think about disability in radically new ways We look to the 60s, we look to the 70s, the emergence of the disability rights movement, or at least the moment when it's coalescing here in California.

For those of us who are art historians, we study these extreme performances, these acts of endurance that took place in art spaces of the time, and yet disability rights activists were occupying buildings and protesting in the streets and really using their bodies to fight discrimination and to change the laws, ultimately.

I think to try to position those actions as influential, which they were, in an art context, and a number of artists who are influenced by what's happening at that moment.

-The field has really exploded, I would say, in the last 10 years, and there's so many great younger artists that are in the show.

I'm so excited that they're also included.

-As an art professor, she became a mentor to a number of important artists of a subsequent generation who have become prominent proponents of disability justice We could look to the work of Sandie Yi, who's a Chicago-based artist who has become well-known for her Crip Couture line.

Crip Couture is a response to the ableism of the fashion industry.

These are wearable artworks that have emerged through the artist's collaboration with people with disabilities.

These works actually highlight the disabilities rather than disguise them.

It's a way of owning disability with a swagger.

I also wanted to talk about the work of Sunaura Taylor.

In this painting, which is called Animals with Arthrogryposis, Taylor is positioned as a fellow animal among other animals, which significantly are animals used in the meat industry.

All of these animals have arthrogryposis, which is a neuromuscular condition that limits the mobility of the hands and arms.

I think this is a really beautiful way of portraying human connection to the animal world.

-I have two large paintings.

One is called Facility of Speech, and the other is called Sephora.

-Both paintings are based on King Solomon's seals that were the spirits that King Solomon, who was the king of Jerusalem, harnessed to achieve his worldly fame and fortune.

He was disabled.

He had a curvature of the spine.

After I had the stroke, I started utilizing the ones that were specific to help me in my healing journey.

-She began collaging angiograms of her brain and brain scans onto the surface of panels and completely changed the way she was working.

The swirls of paint and actually designs represent different symbols of healing.

Curators praised the new work she was making as more interesting than her previous work.

In fact, Sherwood had been using brain scans in her work even before her hemorrhage, and these appeared as a metaphor, an allusion to consciousness.

-I started using brain imagery in 1991.

I had my cerebral hemorrhage in 1997.

I often say it took a while for my life to catch up with my art.

I didn't use my own scans in 1991 because I didn't have scans As soon as I saw the images in the hospital of the cerebral angiogram, which are the images in the paintings, I looked at them and I said, "I need those images."

Everybody started to laugh, which I, to this day, don't understand.

Then I straightened them out.

I said, "No, I'm an artist and I need those images."

These images weren't only medical images to me.

They were a sign that I was going to be okay.

I have to work seated, and I have gotten really good at seeing something flat and then imagine what it would be like vertical.

After my stroke, I felt like I should try to detoxify my studio as much as possible I used acrylic paints and actually latex paint.

It's funny because I taught materials and methods, and I would always see my students have cracks develop in their paintings, and I would just think, "Oh, they don't know any better."

Then all of a sudden, when I started using latex paint and putting it layer over layer, they cracked.

All of a sudden, I loved the cracks because I saw it as a metaphor for my aging body.

-As a professor of art at the University of California, Berkeley, she established a program called Art, Medicine, and Disability, which is also the subtitle of this exhibition.

-I would look at world art, and I would choose the Tibetan book of medicine or the Ethiopian medical scrolls and talk about healing and medicine in that context.

-For her, it was really this affinity-based model of disability that she's putting forward, and she looked at how disability is presented in art throughout time.

-I feel like I've waited for a show of this kind to happen for 25 years.

-I hope that audiences will really come to understand that art is a means by which to survive and to thrive, and it's also a way of bringing communities into existence.

-This is one museum in one particular part of the country.

What I envision is that more and more people get to experience this work for themselves and how strong it is and how long-lasting it is.

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