Panel: Fashion Forward

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 is a designer, curator, and the inaugural Jane B. Nord Professor of Fashion at Pratt Institute. From 2011 to 2023, she served as Chair of Pratt’s Fashion Department, where she led transformative curricular initiatives, including the launch of the MFA in Fashion Collection + Communication. Through both her creative and scholarly practice, Minniti frames fashion as a dynamic form of cultural messaging — a vehicle for challenging dominant narratives and engaging with questions of power, identity, and social meaning. Since 2013, she has collaborated with artist Beverly Semmes under the label CarWash Collective, producing garments, installations, performance, and image-based works that examine the politics of clothing and visibility. Extending these themes into curatorial work, she recently co-curated The New Village, a critically acclaimed exhibition investigating fashion’s role in shaping communal experience and aesthetic discourse. Minniti holds a Bachelor of Science in Fashion Design from Philadelphia University and a Master’s degree in Costume Studies from New York University.

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 Boston area curator, art historian, and educator with over fifteen years of experience working in art institutions and cultural non-profit organizations. She is currently Associate Professor of Art History and Director of Exhibitions and Galleries at Montserrat College of Art. She previously served as the Artistic Director of the Boston University Art Galleries where she curated numerous group and solo exhibitions for the Stone and 808 Galleries. Lynne received her M.A./Ph.D. in art history from Boston University’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture and a 2014-2015 Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship to South Africa. Her research specializations are contemporary art, collection and exhibition histories, and Boston arts from the late 1970s to the 1990s.

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.