How do you throw a brick through the window…
September 2–November 9, 2025
Reception: Thursday, September 4, 6–8pm. TUAG / Boston SMFA at Tufts.
For the Fall 2025 season, Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) is pleased to present two exhibitions and accompanying public art commissions which explore and expand on representations of marginalized bodies while complicating boundaries of power, protest, and visibility.
With Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick, Tufts University Art Galleries presents the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s work to date: beginning in her student days at Tufts, where she tested ideas of ephemerality, scale, and representation in the itinerate installation Boulders, to her most recent fabric installations, ceramics, and paintings that continue to explore issues of visibility and presence.
Over three decades, Semmes (BA/BFA ’82) has built an extensive practice in sculpture, painting, film, performance, and fashion that probes the paradoxes and complexities of the body and its representation. Best known for her oversized dress sculptures, begun in the early 1990s—followed by her FRP (Feminist Responsibility Project) series of over-painted pornographic images and clay sculptures—Semmes has played with the scale, exposure or covering, and abstraction of the female form.
While Semmes has worked in just about every medium, there remains a perpetual friction between presence and absence—be it a room-sized installation of empty gowns in wispy organza, a haunting performance video, or hollow, human-sized clay vessels. Throughout her wide-ranging oeuvre, Semmes offers a material corollary to the internal and public tensions over who in our society takes up space, and in what form.
Beverly Semmes: Boulders / Flag / Flip / Kick is curated by Dina Deitsch, TUAG Director, with the artist Beverly Semmes, Camilo Alvarez, and Deniz Bora, and generously supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
How do you throw a brick through the window… at TUAG / Boston presents new commissions and recent works of art exploring how individuals with disabilities, chronic illnesses, and neurodivergence navigate forms of protest despite the normalization of ableism in public spaces.
Now on view at TUAG through November 9, 2025 and on view at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) March 14–October 4, 2026, the exhibition is part of a two-year research initiative co-organized by TUAG and JMKAC that began in 2024.
How do you throw a brick through the window… features the work of seven artists—Yani aviles, Chloe P. Crawford, Nat Decker, Jeff Kasper, Carly Mandel, Jeffrey Meris, and Libby Paloma—who engage the radical questioning of Korean-American writer, artist, and musician Johanna Hedva: “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?”
This long-term research project, which includes a symposium, artist-led workshops, publication, and the group exhibition, responds to calls for reconsideration of public streets as de-facto sites for civic action and able-bodied action as the measure of protest. Participating artists offer works reimagining embodied dissent informed by disabled, sick, mad, and healing frameworks.
The exhibition is co-organized by TUAG Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin and JMKAC Associate Curator Tanya Gayer in dialogue with the artists.
Generous support for this TUAG exhibition and programming is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Teiger Foundation, The Office of the Vice Provost for Institutional Inclusive Excellence and the Theatre Dance and Performance Studies Department at Tufts University, as well as an anonymous donor. The accompanying symposium and pre-exhibition programming at TUAG were supported by a Warhol Curatorial Research Fellowship for Laurel V. McLaughlin.
The SMFA Billboard Project I want more celebrations… (2025) is contributed by Gabriel Sosa and Maverick Landing Youth as part of Sosa’s project Ñ Press and the Boston Public Art Triennial. How do you throw a brick through the window… continues at TUAG / Medford’s Jackson Lot space with a mural project by contributing artist Libby Paloma, Whether up river, up stream, or up a tree…don’t take the bait. Find the other rainbow fish and swim. (2025).
TUAG / Medford Aidekman Arts Center
40 Talbot Avenue, Medford, Massachusetts 02155