Davina Semo exhibition: 'A Gathering of Bells'
For millennia, bells have organized society by tolling to mark the hours, calling communities to assemble, clanging alarms of danger, and ringing in momentous occasions. These cultural connotations are made even more multivalent by the many shapes and styles bells have taken over the centuries. Since 2017, Davina Semo has explored the meanings and artistic potential of this form in resonant sculptures, translating poured molten bronze into a range of textures, shapes, and patterns with an almost infinite variety of paint or patina finishes. This exhibition, the artist’s first solo museum showcase of her bells, features more than 50 works suspended at different heights in groupings that emphasize their polyphony. Together, the bells offer variations on a theme with complex surfaces that reflect their environment and encourage viewers to engage with sculpture in the round. Ultimately, Semo invites us to consider the functional elements of art by experiencing its sonic dimensions. As museum visitors strike the clapper against the shell, their action becomes participation and metaphor simultaneously: we hear the ringing bell vibrate and sense how our gestures reverberate outward toward others.
A Gathering of Bells is organized by SCAD Museum of Art chief curator Daniel S. Palmer.
About the artist
Davina Semo (b. 1981, Washington, D.C.; lives and works in San Francisco) earned a B.A. in visual arts and creative writing from Brown University and an M.F.A from University of California, San Diego. Semo has been awarded various public commissions, including Reverberation at Brooklyn Bridge Park Pier 1, New York, organized by Public Art Fund (2021), and an installation of three large bells at Powder Mountain, the outdoor art park originated by Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings in Eden, Utah (2025). Semo has previously shown work in solo exhibitions at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, Calif., and numerous group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Calif.; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco; SOMArts Cultural Center, San Francisco; White Columns, New York; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C. Her work is held in collections at the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Mass.; the National Museum of Women in the Arts; and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Claremont, Calif.