About the artist:

Joan Semmel (born October 19, 1932) is an American feminist painter, professor, and writer. She is best known for her large scale realistic nude self portraits as seen from her perspective looking down.

Semmel was born in New York City. She 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. Although Semmel's mother was comfortable talking about her own sexuality, seeing her daughter's paintings of sexual scenes was difficult for her because she still kept a kosher home and had a traditional notion of modesty.

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. During a 2015 panel discussion titled "Painting and the Legacy of Feminism" at Maccarone Gallery, Semmel stated "I would like to get away from the basic declaration of why there are no great women artists. There are great women artists. There are many great women artists. And we shouldn't still be talking about why there are no great women artists. If there aren’t great celebrated women artists, that's because we have not been celebrating them, but not because they are not there."

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.

About major themes in her work, Semmel states, "While my work developed through series, the connecting thread across decades is a single perspective: being inside the experience of femaleness and taking possession of it culturally." Though Semmel has created many different series throughout her career, the majority of her oeuvre features themes of sexuality, the body, intimacy and self-exploration both physically and psychologically.