Fashion Forward: Beverly Semmes, Jennfier Minetti, Michelle Finamore, and Lynne Cooney 

Since the early 1990s, Beverly Semmes has created installations and sculptures of enormous dresses—some reaching over three-stories high, others taking over entire gallery spaces.  Since those early days, her relationship with fashion has grown and deepened—from sculptures and installations to an ongoing collaboration with fashion designer Jennifer Minniti—CarWash Collective—that creates wearable garments cut and patterned with Semmes’s images. 

Join us for an open conversation with Semmes, Jennifer Minniti, and fashion curator Michelle Finamore, moderated by Lynne Cooney about the intersection of fashion and art. 

Jennifer Minniti: Designer, curator, scholar, and academic administrator; currently the B Nord Professor, Fashion Department at Pratt Institute and formerly associate chair and associate dean, California College of the Arts, where she taught in the Fashion Design Department (1997–2011); other teaching appointments include visiting professorships in Fashion at CEDIM University in Monterrey, Mexico, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; industry experience includes Donna Karan and Clothespin sustainable collection; curatorial work includes the DeYoung Museum and the Wattis Institute, both in San Francisco, California 

Michelle Tolini Finamore, Ph.D., is a Fashion and Design Historian, Curator and Author. Forthcoming exhibitions include Historic New England’s Shoe Stories: Past, Present Future and the Bard Graduate Center’s Goddesses in the Machine: Fashion in Silent Film. Past exhibitions include the recent Fashioning America: Grit to Glamour at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, as well as the groundbreaking Gender Bending Fashion, #techstyle, Hollywood Glamour and Think Pink at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  She is passionate about silent film and her 2014 Hollywood Before Glamour: Fashion in American Silent Film was the first in-depth book on the subject. She has written numerous books and articles for both the scholarly and popular press on topics as varied as American fashion, menswear, contemporary fashion, sustainability, studio jewelry, and food history and has taught courses on fashion/design/film history at various colleges in NYC and the Northeast.  She has also interviewed fashion luminaries such as Hamish Bowles, Fern Mallis, Isaac Mizrahi, Liz Goldwyn, Hussein Chalayan, Diane Pernet, Viktoria Modesta, Virgil Ortiz, and Rodarte on stage. 

Lynne Cooney, Ph.D., is a curator, art historian, and educator with over fifteen years of experience working in art institutions and cultural non-profit organizations. She is currently the Director of Exhibitions and Galleries at Montserrat College of Art. She previously served as the Artistic Director and chief curator of the Boston University Art Galleries where she curated numerous group and solo exhibitions for the Stone and 808 Galleries including solo projects by the artists Willie Cole, Raul Gonzalez, Geoffrey Chadsey, Alexandria Smith, and Sheila Pree Bright. 

Lynne received her M.A./Ph.D. in art history from Boston University’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture. Her dissertation focuses on collection and exhibition practices in South Africa in relationship to colonial histories and decolonization theories. In 2014, she was the recipient of a Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship to South Africa. 

Beverly Semmes (b. 1958, Washington, D.C., lives and works in New York, NY) graduated from Tufts University and School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA at Tufts) with a BFA in 1982 and received an MFA from Yale School of Art in 1987, after attending the New York Studio School in 1983-84. Semmes been honored with numerous solo museum exhibitions including presentations at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the ICA Philadelphia; the Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle; The Ginza Art Space, Tokyo; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Image: Beverly Semmes, 4’ 33”, 2011.