Joan Semmel
| Joan Semmel | |
|---|---|
| Born |
October 19, 1932 New York City, NY |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Painting |
| Movement | Figurative art, Feminist Art |
Joan Semmel (born October 19, 1932, New York City) is an American feminist painter, professor, and writer. She is best known for painting large scale, realistic nudes of her own body as seen from her perspective looking down.
Semmel began her artistic training at Cooper Union, where she studied under Nicholas Marsicano. She went on to study with Morris Kantor at the Art Students League of New York before earning a BFA from the Pratt Institute in 1963.
She spent seven and a half years in Spain (1963-1970), where her work "gradually developed from broad gestural and spatially referenced painting to compositions of a somewhat surreal figure/ground composition...(her) highly saturated brilliant color separated (her) paintings from the leading Spanish artists whose work was darker, grayer and Goyaesque." Semmel returned to New York City in 1970 and earned an MFA from the Pratt Institute in 1972. Upon returning to New York in 1970, Semmel was shocked by the number of sexualized images of women she saw on American newsstands. She began to paint in a figurative style, and incorporated the erotic themes for which she is known today. Her MFA thesis show at Pratt consisted of paintings from the First Erotic Series.
In New York, Semmel became involved in the feminist movement and feminist art groups devoted to gender equality in the art world. She has been a member of the Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists, the Fight Censorship (FC) group,Women in the Arts (WIA), and the Art Workers Coalition (AWC). The Women's Caucus for Art honored Semmel as a 2013 recipient of the organization's Lifetime Achievement Award.
Semmel has taught at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Maryland Institute College of Art. As of 2013, she is Professor Emeritus of Painting at Rutgers University. In 2000 Semmel taught at International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg, Austria.
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