Sheila Pepe: Softly...Before the Supreme Court 

About

Minnesota Museum of American Art (the M) has commissioned New York-based installation artist Sheila Pepe to create a site-responsive installation in the M's sculpture court. This work will be premiered on the occasion of the opening of the new museum in the Pioneer Endicott buildings in December 2018.

Sheila Pepe is an artist and educator known for her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculptures made from domestic and industrial materials through a process she calls "improvisational crochet." Since the mid-1990s, Pepe has used lesbian feminist and craft traditions to investigate systems of power in institutions of art and education.

"Softly…Before the Supreme Court" is a reference to architect Cass Gilbert, who designed the United State Supreme Court in Washington D.C., as well as the Endicott building which houses the new M. Born to an Italian immigrant family in Morristown, New Jersey, Pepe connected immediately to Gilbert’s Italian Renaissance designs and marble used throughout the interior. Her looping, drooping lines and crocheted shapes are a response to the gravity and hard geometries of the room – a soft, gestural rejoinder to two landmark buildings by one of America's most famous architects

About the Artist: Sheila Pepe received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art, Boston in 1983, and later an MFA at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1995. Pepe has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad in solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Smith College Museum of Art, PS1/MoMA, the Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art in New York, and the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale. She has received a number of awards, including: an Art Matters grant, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant, and The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. As an educator, she trespasses the boundaries of fixed disciplines in art and design, and is currently a Core Critic in the Painting + Printmaking department at Yale University.