George Adams Gallery is pleased to present Aggressive Women & Female Martyrs, an exhibition of portraits of female saints and dominatrixes. Begun in 1977 and first at the Gallery Paule Anglim in San Francisco, the series currently numbers some 70 works in total. While this country's abiding puritanical and patriarchal values would praise the saints and damn women from engaging in BDSM as transgressive sinners, Sherwood rejects this. The two categories of women can also be seen as representations of stages in Sherwood's life converging during self-discovery, not just of her sexuality, but of herself as an artist and feminist.
