New York artist Sheila Pepe will speak about making life and making art during the pandemic in a free and public Facebook LIVE event with an active Q&A.
Pepe is a cross-disciplinary artist employing conceptualism, surrealism, and craft to address feminist and class issues. She is also an artist and educator known for her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculptures made from domestic and industrial materials through a self-described process of “improvisational crochet.” Since the mid-1990s, she has used lesbian feminist and craft traditions to investigate systems of power in institutions of art and education. Born in Morristown, New Jersey, Pepe comes from a lineage of craftspeople: her grandfather was a shoemaker, and her maternal elders were skilled in crochet. She cites her family and the work of women before her as influences on her own practice, naming artists like Judy Chicago, Eva Hesse, Mira Schor, and Nancy Spero as inspirations.
Pepe has received a number of awards and has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad in solo and group exhibitions at venues including the MoMA PS1, the Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art in New York, and the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale. Her mid-career survey, “Hot Mess Formalism,” was featured at the Phoenix Art Museum and traveled to the Everson Museum and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in 2018.