Conversation with Sheila Pepe, New York, 2003

Sheila Pepe, born in 1959 in New Jersey to a second-generation Italian-American family, reflects on how her upbringing shaped her identity and artistic path. Her mother, from the World War II generation, emphasized assimilation, while her Catholic all-women’s college and studies in ceramics at Massachusetts College of Art laid the groundwork for her evolving feminist perspective.

At art school, Pepe “came out immediately as a lesbian separatist, which was problematic in that I was working in the art world, and the separatist philosophy was based on issues of patriarchy, and the art world was part of patriarchy.” Later Pepe moved to western Massachusetts, where she engaged with a feminist lesbian community but eventually distanced herself due to its ideological rigidity: “As a woman and as a lesbian, I’ve always called myself a feminist. I always considered my project a feminist project, but one that was more about infiltrating something mainstream.”

She highlights her encounter with Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party and Eva Hesse’s Hang Up in 1979 as a watershed moment: “Both having incredible impact on my sensibility… And then later realizing that they were two totally different kinds of operations from two different languages. And the sort of micro-politics around the segregation of those two languages seems an important part of the infrastructure of what a feminist project is.”

Pepe’s crocheted installations draw from divergent feminist legacies—reconnecting high and low, formal and craft-based art. Pepe also likens her artistic role to her family’s deli work: “I bring feminist sensibility to the everyday, in my work and in my teaching. And I am keen to point out feminist history in terms of my life and also in terms of my art… I try to retain as much of the feminist understanding, which in many cases ends up to be somewhat humanist.”

She stresses that feminism is an ongoing project: “I’m kind of incidentally interested in history in terms of longer passages of time and progress. For example, with my students, I encourage them to think of the feminist project as a very long project.”

Pepe also curated My Mother’s an Artist, an exhibition tracing the legacies of mothers as artists: “It comes from the fact that my mother taught me how to do this thing [crocheting], and that it’s perhaps one of the only legacies that I can carry on from my family that I can bring a new value to.”

She highlights the importance of ephemeral, uncommodified spaces, sustaining feminist lineage where ideas can be freely exchanged beyond market pressures: “It’s an attempt to change that space, for a moment. This idea that you could create something different for a flash… so the ephemerality is really important to me and there’s some oral tradition, an experiential tradition that that gets passed from one person to the next.”