Intro
Beverly Semmes (BA/BFA ‘82) has built an extensive art practice in sculpture, painting, film, performance, and fashion that probes the paradoxes and complexities of the body and its representation. Best known for her
oversized dress sculptures, begun in the early 1990s–followed by her FRP (Feminist Responsibility Project) series of over-painted pornographic images and clay sculptures–Semmes has played with the scale, exposure or covering, and abstraction of the female form for over three decades.
TUAG is pleased to present the most comprehensive survey of Semmes’ work to date: beginning in her student days at Tufts, where she tested ideas of ephemerality, scale, and representation in the itinerate installation Boulders, to her most recent fabric installations, ceramics, and paintings which continue to explore issues of female visibility and presence. Throughout her wide-ranging oeuvre, Semmes offers a material corollary to the internal and public tensions over who in our society is allowed to take up space and in what form.
Artist resources/interviews
Beverly Semmes, slide of Boulders, 1980s. Photography, 2023 (photo by Beverly Semmes). Copyright the Artist. Courtesy of the Artist.
Beverly Semmes (b. 1958, Washington, D.C., lives and works in New York, NY) graduated from Tufts University and School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA at Tufts) with a BFA in 1982 and received an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1987, after attending the New York Studio School in 1984-84. Semmes has been honored with numerous solo museum exhibitions including presentations at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the ICA Philadelphia; the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; The Ginza Art Space, Tokyo; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.
Semmes’ work can be found in the permanent collections of the Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C., the Walker art Center, Minneapolis, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, the Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, The Netherlands, Tufts University Art Galleries, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, among others.
Tufts resources
Open access resources
Key Questions/Questions for Self-Guided Exploration:
Beverly Semmes, Buried Treasure, 1994. Crushed velvet. Dimensions variable. Copyright the Artist. Courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery.
-
Semmes’s sculptures juxtapose soft materials with a large presence. How can we think of these works as psychological or social metaphors?
-
How can absence or invisibility be used to create or reveal meaning?
-
In what way do the pieces in the Feminist Responsibility Project contend with notions of female agency and sexuality? How have these notions changed over time, if at all?
-
Much of Semmes’s work is concerned with the body, including considering it a landscape. In what ways does thinking of the body as landscape challenge our sense of self and relationship to nature? Material choices are central to the impact of Semmes’s work. How would different materials change the impact of the pieces? Would it change the message of any pieces?
-
In her Artist Selects exhibit in Slater Concourse outside the gallery, Semmes curates a group based of artworks from the Permanent Collection using the color yellow as a constraint or exercise. What role does color play in her own pieces?