Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick

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 and Camilo Alvarez 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.

Image: 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. 

Images: Slide of Boulders, 1980s, photography, 2023. Photo by Beverly Semmes. FLAG, 2024, velvet, acrylic over photograph printed on canvas, 26 ½ x 29 x 2 ¼ in.