CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 8/6/2021

The first major survey on octogenarian feminist painter Joan Semmel

“Recognition” (2020) is reproduced from Skin in the Game, the first comprehensive catalog on the influential New York feminist painter Joan Semmel. Published in advance of her October retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, this long-overdue survey features key paintings alongside rarely seen drawings and collages. “Semmel’s work has in itself always been a mirror—reflecting our own insecurities and fears about bodies, beauty and now aging,” Jodi Throckmorton writes. “In critiques about the overt sexuality in art, music, television, etc., made by women, a fear of women’s freedom is apparent. Women today may not choose to show their sexuality as many feminists in the 1970s had hoped. There remains a divide between the sex celebrated by artists like Semmel and the sex-positive movement that began in the 1980s that has seeped into popular culture today. Much of the divide is centered on the acceptance of pornography and, for Semmel, the way many female artists appropriate the images and symbols pictured in pornography without inquiry into what those images signify. This divide can hinder us from fully understanding the important work that Semmel has done towards the acceptance of female sexuality and better awareness of women’s bodies.”