Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Public Art
Website: davinasemo.com
Davina Semo (b. 1981, Washington, DC) is a sculptor whose practice spans cast bronze, blown glass, and industrial materials. She received a BA in Visual Arts and Creative Writing from Brown University and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego. She has been represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco and was a finalist for SFMOMA’s prestigious 2019 SECA Art Award, which recognizes artists working in the Bay Area.
Semo’s career gained significant momentum through a series of simultaneous solo exhibitions in 2019 at Marlborough Contemporary in New York, Jessica Silverman in San Francisco, and Ribordy Thetaz in Geneva — a rare trifecta that established her international profile. In 2020, she opened her first institutional solo show at the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art in Napa, California, accompanied by poetry composed by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Forrest Gander. Her work entered the collections of the de Young Museum in San Francisco, the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the Davis Museum at Wellesley College, the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, and the Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth, Minnesota.
Semo was commissioned by Public Art Fund to create Reverberation, a suite of five cast-bronze bells installed at Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 1 in New York from 2020 to 2021. In 2024–2025, three of her large bells — Listener, Reflector, and Mother — were permanently installed at Powder Mountain in Eden, Utah, alongside works by James Turrell, Jenny Holzer, and Paul McCarthy. Her solo exhibition Tender Shield, featuring bronze and blown glass bells alongside monumental wall reliefs, opened at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College in August 2025.
Semo is best known for her cast-bronze bells, which she has explored since 2017 as her primary sculptural form. Each bell is individually cast and finished with distinctive combinations of patina, texture, automotive paint, or polish, resulting in an almost infinite variety of surfaces — from matte earthen tones to pearlescent automotive finishes. Clappers are suspended on hemp shibari rope and stainless steel chain, and visitors are invited to ring the bells, making sonic participation central to the work’s meaning. She has more recently expanded into blown glass bells, introducing color and translucency into her practice.
Her wall reliefs — large patinated bronze panels and works incorporating acrylic mirrors with steel ball bearings — engage the viewer’s body and reflection, blurring the boundary between object and observer. Recurring themes across her practice include public assembly, civic communication, the relationship between interior and exterior experience, and the transformative potential of material. Her works often carry evocative titles drawn from nature and sensation — Hummingbird, Bloom, Listener, Mother — suggesting an emotional register beneath the industrial surfaces. The bells’ drilled apertures allow light to pour in and sound to move outward, a metaphor Semo has described as the flow between internal life and the external world.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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