“What I’ve seen, done and made speaks to a turn infinitely more internal; a process required to speak more plainly to this long moment of collective crisis.” Sheila Pepe, 2024.
In her first public lecture in the UK, Sheila Pepe will explore her wide-ranging practice, her lesbian feminist activism and the longstanding conceptual pursuit of her making, teaching, research, and writing to contest received knowledge and expand ways of being in the world.
Sheila Pepe’s radical practice is embedded in process-led research and in advancing conversations about the status and deeply rooted gendered hierarchies of genres such as formalism and craft whilst investigating their possibilities and how they impact notions of value and taste. Sheila Pepe: Hot Mess Formalism, the groundbreaking touring exhibition first shown at the Phoenix Museum of Art in 2017, evidenced the ways that Pepe has built a more expansive and complex way of working since the mid-1980s. Using feminist and craft traditions, Pepe investigates received notions concerning the production of canonical artworks as well as the artist’s relationship to museum displays and the art institution. Intrinsically concerned with issues of kinship and community building, Pepe subverts socially constructed paradigms through kinaesthetic human and artistic connections.
For more than 30 years, Pepe has accumulated a family resemblance of works in sculpture/installation/drawing, and other singular and hybrid forms: sometimes drawings that are sculpture, or sculpture that is furniture, fibre works that appear as paintings, and table top objects that look like models for monuments, and stand as votives for a secular religion. These intertwined cultural sources and their meanings are informed by home crafts, lesbian, queer and feminist aesthetics, 20th century canonical arts, 2nd Vatican Council American design, an array of Roman Catholic sources as well as their ancient precedents. Often site-specific, there is a critical relationship to traditional boundaries of museum display that are essential to Pepe’s sculptural practice.
Organised by Dr Indie A. Choudhury, Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Art (Global Black Diasporas & Black Studies) at the Courtauld Institute, as part of the Courtauld Centre for the Art of the Americas, directed by Professor Jo Applin.
Speaker:
Sheila Pepe is a renowned artist best known for crocheting large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture made from domestic and industrial materials, using feminist and craft traditions. She has exhibited widely throughout the United States and internationally in solo, group and collaborative exhibitions and projects, including Sheila Pepe: When and Where we Rest, Tang Museum, Skidmore, Fiber: Sculpture 1960–Present, ICA/Boston, “We have never participated:” 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale, China, the first Greater New York, PS1/MoMA; Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art & Craft, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Artisterium, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia, and Queer Threads, the Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art, New York. Pepe was commissioned for her first large scale outdoor public installation My Neighbor’s Garden in Madison Square Park, New York in 2023. She has received numerous awards including an Art Matters Grant, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant, The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award and a Trellis Art Fund Stepping Stone Grant. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the Harvard University Art Museums, Rose Art Museum, and The Smith College Museum of Art. Pepe was the 2024-25 Henry W. and Marian T. Mitchell Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome and in 2024, she was elected a National Academician of the National Academy of Design. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
Wooden poles, rigging hardware, nylon string, shoelaces, paracord, rubber bands, garden hose, polyester arborist rope, weed-¬whacker line, plant materials
Dimensions variable.
Commissioned by Madison Square Park Conservancy, New York Courtesy of the artist and Marinaro, New York. Image by Hunter Canning.
