Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick Artist Conversation + Reception

Join us for a public conversation at 6PM at TUAG / Medford (Aidekman Arts Center) with exhibiting artist Beverly Semmes, exhibition curator TUAG Director Dina Deitsch, and Camilo Alvarez followed by a reception celebrating the exhibition.

Tufts/SMFA alumna Beverly Semmes (BA/BFA ’82) has built an extensive 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 that continue to explore issues of female visibility and presence.

While Semmes has worked in just about every medium, there remains a perpetual friction between presence and absence—be it a room-sized installation of empty gowns in wispy organza, a haunting performance video, or hollow, human-sized clay vessels. 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.

Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick is curated by Dina Deitsch, TUAG Director, with the artist Beverly Semmes, Camilo Alvarez, and Deniz Bora, and generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

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 1983-84. Semmes 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.

Recent group exhibitions include Always In Relation: 50 Years of the Gallery at Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University, Middletown; The New Village: Ten Years of New York Fashion at Pratt Manhattan Gallery, NYC as well as Witch Hunt at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the 57th Carnegie International, at the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh. 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.

Camilo Alvarez was born in New York, N.Y., and resides in Boston. He received a B.A. in Art History from Skidmore College and a Masters of Liberal Arts in Museum Studies from Harvard University. He has worked at Exit Art (N.Y., N.Y.), Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens, N.Y.), MIT’s List Visual Art Center (Cambridge, MA) and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (N.Y., N.Y. and Skowhegan, ME).

He is the Co-Chair of the Advisory Board at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and is on the National Advisory Council of Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum. He is the Owner, Director and Preparator at Samsøñ, formerly Samson Projects, founded in 2004. He is also the Vice Chair of the Boston Art Commission. Alvarez has given solo exhibitions to William Pope.L (2010), Rebecca Morris (2006), Kader Attia (2008), and Beverly Semmes (2017), among many.

Image: Beverly Semmes, Buried Treasure, 1994. Crushed velvet. Dimensions variable. Copyright the Artist. Courtesy Shoshana Wayne Gallery.