Beverly Semmes

Beverly Semmes is a multidisciplinary artist whose work incorporates sculpture, painting, drawing, film, photography, and performance. These complementary elements adhere in surprising ways, probing the paradoxes and complexities of the female body and its representation.

This spring Susan Inglett Gallery will present Beverly Semmes: Cut Paste, an exhibition of new mixed media paintings and sculptures on view from 25 April through 1 June 2024. The exhibition coincides with a display of the artist’s seminal Super 8 film and photo-based work from 1988-1991 in Wonderland: Curious Nature at the New York Botanical Gardens on view from 18 May through 27 October 2024.

Born in Washington D.C. and based in New York City, Semmes is an important figure in third-wave feminist art. She has been honored with many 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. In fall 2025, her alma mater, Tufts University, will present a major solo exhibition at the University Gallery.

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, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC, among others.

Semmes received her M.F.A. in Sculpture from the Yale School of Art (1987). She also studied at the New York Studio School, Tufts University/Boston Museum School, and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, where she now serves on the Governors Board. Semmes is represented by Susan Inglett Gallery in New York and Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Los Angeles.