The same year Joan Semmel became the first tenured woman faculty member in the studio art department at Douglass College (now Rutgers University), New Brunswick, NJ, her work was the subject of a one-person exhibition at Jorgensen Gallery at the University of Connecticut, Storrs. Works on paper and paintings where she used her own body as subject, like in Intimacy-Autonomy (1974; Brooklyn Museum, NY) and Mythologies and Me (1976; Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin), were presented in the show.
In the exhibition brochure, Semmel explains, “My return to the figure in 1970, from an Abstract Expressionist background, was prompted by a need to work from a more personal viewpoint, and was charged by my then-emerging consciousness as a feminist. The search for a plastic means with which to express personal and social concerns has led me to the most literal possible interpretations of female self-determination, a first person definition of self.”