Joan Semmel: In the Flesh

At the Jewish Museum, **Joan Semmel: In the Flesh** surveys Semmel’s sustained inquiry into the lived body, painted from the inside out. Her work, long central to New York’s feminist art discourse since the 1970s, insists on aging, desire, and self-possession as subjects worthy of scrutiny rather than concealment. The exhibition traces how her close cropping and direct gaze shift the nude from an object to a site of agency. One clear takeaway is how stubbornly these paintings resist the city’s usual visual shorthand for femininity.