Sheila Pepe

2024 Stepping Stone Grantee

SHEILA PEPE is best known for crocheting her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture made from domestic and industrial materials. However, the exhibition “Sheila Pepe: Hot Mess Formalism,” curated by Gilbert Vicario for the Phoenix Museum of Art, and the catalogue published with it, showed us that Pepe has built a more expansive and complex way of working since her start in the mid-1980s. For more than 30 years she has accumulated a family resemblance (see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations ) of works in sculpture—installation—drawing and other singular and hybrid forms. Some are drawings that are sculpture—or sculpture that is furniture, fiber works that appear as paintings, and table top objects that look like models for monuments, and stand as votives for a secular religion. The cultural sources and the meanings twisted together are from canonical arts of the 20th century, home crafts, lesbian, queer and feminist aesthetics, 2nd Vatican Council American design, an array of Roman Catholic sources as well as their ancient precedents. The constant conceptual pursuit of Pepe’s research, making, teaching and writing has been to contest received knowledge, opinions and taste.