Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick

Tufts/SMFA alumna Beverly Semmes (BFA ’82) has built an extensive feminist 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’s work to date spanning four decades: 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 sartorial/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 and Camilo Alvarez and generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Image: Beverly Semmes, Buried Treasure , 1994. Courtesy of the artist and Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC.