Joan Semmel: In the Flesh
Visual Identity, Exhibition, Architecture
Exhibition design for the boundary-breaking work of Joan Semmel at The Jewish Museum in New York City
Embodying an iconic, feminist experience
Isometric collaborated with The Jewish Museum to design the first major New York City retrospective of Joan Semmel, the consequential American feminist painter who has dedicated five decades to the politics of sexual representation from a woman’s perspective through boldly intimate, erotically-charged self-portraiture. Though we explored several more complex architectural concepts, Semmel and the museum ultimately selected a single C-shaped wall floating on rounded piloti. This deceptively simple intervention maximizes viewing distance for 16 of Semmel’s monumental paintings, positioned on the gallery’s exterior walls. It also encloses a dense, salon-style installation of nearly 50 modern and contemporary works chosen by Semmel, illuminating her longstanding roles as curator, mentor, and educator. The restrained, minimalist design serves as a corrective to a historical injustice, affording Semmel the expansive white box presentation more often granted to her male contemporaries. Ash wood benches inspired by an I-beam footstool in the artist’s studio complete the installation, offering visitors a place to rest and engage with the exhibition’s sweeping display.
Artwork © 2026 Joan Semmel / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Inverting the public and private domains
Historically relegated to the taboo or private domains, sexually explicit artwork is often displayed with dim lighting in intimate spaces. Joan's goal was to showcase her monumental works in a "public square" where audiences could encounter it as a collective. Meanwhile, the museum's goal for the display of collection works was to create a more intimate experience for close observation. Isometric's architectural gesture synthesized both demands, inverting the public and private, with Joan's works on the peripheries looking in on and contemplating the narratives presented by the collections works in the center.
A contemporary typographic lens
The graphic design of the exhibit is stark yet nuanced, with black titles set in custom typography with rounded corners, evoking the corporeality of Semmel’s paintings. To relieve the burden of extensive wall labels, Isometric developed a gallery guide for the salon-style installation in the exhibit’s central space. We also created a fold-out poster featuring an extended interview with the artist and reproducing Sunlight (1978), the iconic Semmel painting from The Jewish Museum’s collection, which is offered as a takeaway to all visitors.
“The intentionally sparse aesthetic of the exhibition, which embraces the gallery as one continuous space, evokes the raw, airy atmosphere in which the paintings were initially displayed. The recreation of the white-box aesthetic also alludes to mid-century art world power structures and aesthetic codes, shaped by the machismo of the Minimalist and Abstract Expressionist movements, which Semmel challenged at the outset of her career.”
