The Artist Roundtable: Sheila Pepe

November 8, 2023

Sheila Pepe is best known for crocheting her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculptures made from domestic and industrial materials. Yet her recent exhibition, Sheila Pepe: Hot Mess Formalism, curated by Gilbert Vicario for the Phoenix Museum of Art, and the catalogue published with it, showed us how expansive and complex her work is. For more than 30 years, Pepe has created sculptures, installations, drawings, and other works that share a family resemblance and shapeshift among them—drawings that are sculptures, sculptures that are furniture, fiber works that appear as paintings, tabletop objects that look like models for monuments, and more. Her cultural sources range across canonical arts of the 20th century; home crafts; lesbian, queer, and feminist aesthetics; and Roman Catholic source materials. The constant conceptual pursuit of Pepe’s research, making, teaching, and writing contests received knowledge, opinions, and taste.

The Artists Roundtable, an international forum for leading practitioners, is hosted by David A. Ross, faculty member of the MA Curatorial programs at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.