Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation, textile
Website: angelahennessy.com
Angela Hennessy was born in 1971 in Monterey, California, and lives and works in Oakland. She holds an MFA from the California College of the Arts, where she is an Associate Professor teaching courses on visual and cultural narratives of death in contemporary art. She is also a former hospice volunteer and death doula, and serves on the advisory board of Recompose, a Seattle-based human composting company. In 2015 she survived a gunshot wound while interrupting a violent assault in front of her house; The School of the Dead, her manifesto written during the following months of recovery — alternating between poem, prayer, and call to action — has been in development as an educational program since.
She is co-founder of SeeBlackWomxn, a Black feminist art movement that centers the work of Black women artists, whose nationally recognized campaign See Black Womxn: Rising successfully advocated for a public artwork honoring Maya Angelou at San Francisco's main public library. She is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award winner, a 2021 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellow, and a San Francisco Artadia Award winner. Her work is in the permanent collections of the de Young Museum and the Crocker Art Museum, and has been featured in The New Yorker, Sculpture Magazine, and Surface Design Journal.
Hennessy constructs large-scale sculptures and installations from synthetic and human hair — gathered from beauty supply stores and wig shops in West Oakland — using the gestures of domestic labor: washing, wrapping, stitching, knotting, brushing, and braiding. The works build ephemeral and celestial forms out of materials embedded in the cultural, political, and economic histories of Black women's bodies. Hair, in Hennessy's hands, becomes simultaneously a marker of identity, a site of mourning, a form of resistance, and a means of communication — with the living, and with the dead. Maritime flag designs, crocheted structures, and braided architectures carry coded messages about the African diaspora, forced migration, grief, and survival. Her audio guides, meditations, and poems have been featured at SFMOMA and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
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