Tuesday March 4, 2025
Angela Hennessy (American, 1971)
For Those Who Chose the Sea, 2024
Synthetic hair on canvas, 48 x 60 inches
“Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and Associate Professor at California College of the Arts where she 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 everyday gestures of domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, weaving, brushing, and braiding.
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.” from Pt. 2 Gallery