Artist unafraid to step outside of tradition, she says

From bright red dresses to white clay vases, artist Beverly Semmes does it all.

About 60 people gathered in Morse Auditorium Tuesday night to hear Semmes speak about her work and career as an artist.

Director of the School of Visual Arts at Boston University and event coordinator Lynne Allen chose Semmes to speak because she said she liked the variety of choices and materials Semmes uses in space to create art, such as fabrics, clay and even Christmas trees.

“Even if people don’t understand 100 percent of her art, they think it’s cool,” Allen said.

Semmes, a graduate of Yale University, started her career living next to a psychiatric hospital that faced a garden. It was there she started taking a series of photographs of her friends, family and peers in various poses and get-ups, for example in a pink feather coat or hedge hat.

She began her lecture by going through all her art pieces in silence to familiarize audience members with her style because she said her art follows a trajectory.

“My early pieces were really simply constructed,” she said.

Later in her career, her art became more elaborated in the choices of colors, materials and sizes. However, Semmes said she knew her interests always centered on landscape and painting.

Semmes said she still can’t decide what is her favorite medium to work with is.

“It switches, just like cycles,” she said. “Right now, I’m very much into glass.”

A few years after experimenting with different materials and colors in her art, Semmes began teaching ceramics, which triggered her inspiration for her own ceramic works.

“I was a little shy of showing them,” she said. “My early experiences were dopey, even though I liked my dopey ceramics.”

Then, she started sewing dresses. Among her most famous dresses is a 30-foot-long and 12-foot-tall red dress. She said she had this feeling where she wanted to make something where she would be an element of it.

“I did not know exactly, but those dresses were a way of marking space,” she said. “I had a definite sense of how I wanted people to move in the dresses. I like the way dresses were put on the walls too.”

Semmes said she does not know exactly where her inspiration stems from, and does not begin her pieces with sketches. She said renowned artist and sculptor Louise Bourgeois has been a big influence on her for a very long time.

Students said they enjoyed listening to Semmes’ insight on her career choice and art.

“I am not familiar with fine arts,” said attendee Shawn Lynch. “But I think the artist is great.”
School of Museum of Fine Arts student Katherine Mixon said she agreed.

“It was a different format of lecture than usual,” she said. “I was interested in her work, and it was good.”