Skin in the Game: Joan Semmel

Artist Joan Semmel (b.1932) began her painting career in the 1960s while living in Madrid as an Abstract Expressionist, exhibiting in Spain and South America. Returning to New York in 1970, she moved to figuration in response to pornography and concerns around representation of women in the culture. Her practice traces the transformation that women’s sexuality has seen in the last century and emphasizes the possibility for female autonomy through the body. Her work has been widely exhibited and is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Tate, London, United Kingdom, the Brooklyn Museum, NY; and The Dallas Museum, TX; among many others.

Art historian, critic, and curator Amelia Jones is the Robert A. Day Professor and Vice Dean of Academics & Research in Roski School of Art & Design at USC. Amelia is the curator of the critically acclaimed exhibition Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago’s ‘Dinner Party’ in Feminist Art History at the Hammer Museum and most recently Queer Communion: Ron Athey at Participant, Inc., New York and ICA, Los Angeles. Recent publications include In Between Subjects: A Critical Genealogy of Queer Performance (Routledge Press, 2021), the anthology Otherwise: Imagining Queer Feminist Art Histories (Manchester University Press, 2016), and Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (Routledge Press, 2012).