Beverly Semmes

Starting October 10, 2021, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California, will house an exhibition titled Witch Hunt, featuring sixteen women artists from thirteen countries. Semmes' work Helmet (2018) will be featured alongside many other works that strive to encourage dialogue about contemporary feminist issues.

In 2014, the Tang Museum presented the exhibition Opener 27 Beverly Semmes: FRP, which subsequently traveled to the Weatherspoon Art Museum and the Faulconer Gallery at Grinnell College.

Semmes began work on her series Feminist Responsibility Project (FRP) in the early 2000s. After receiving a cache of gentleman's magazines from a neighbor, the artist has spent the last two decades censoring pages from Penthouse and Hustler magazine with ink and paint. She partially covers the models' bodies as they engaged in titillating positions and acts, turning them into boldly-colored, abstract shapes and leaving their extremities, faces, and limbs uncovered. Writing on the FRP series, critic Martha Schwendener stated, “What she leaves blank, amid these colorful, blobby abstractions, are grasping hands, supplicating eyes, or sharp stiletto heels we associate with pornographic images (and performances).” The censoring of the images serves as an effort to protect the subject and the viewer from the imagery of porn, highlighting American society's conflicted relationship to pornography and sexual censorship.

Beverly Semmes (born 1958) is an American artist based in New York City who works in sculpture, textile, video, photography, performance, and large-scale installation. She studied at the Boston Museum School, Tufts University, and at the Yale University School of Art. During her graduate studies she experimented with heavy wire sculptures and with artificial objects rendered as natural ones, such as trees made of steel with painted-on leaves, which she ultimately placed in natural settings. Semmes is now best known for her large-scale sculpture and installations, which often explore the relationship between craft and fine art while simultaneously dealing with issues related to feminism, gender roles and womanhood. She explores this in many different ways, notably with her textile work, as textiles are traditionally associated with women and women's work. Her oversized dresses are dysfunctional in scale and composition, emphasizing the absence of the body. Semmes has stated that these pieces have a theatrical, performative quality and that she uses clothing as a means to explore its power and influence on the internal and external. Her ceramic works, often juxtaposed with her fabric installations, tend to be roughly shaped vessels in bright fluorescent shades, while her crystal works defy our expectations of the medium and serve as a metaphor for the female body.