WE ARE PAPER TOWEL: A CULTURAL CONSTRUCTION PERFORMED BY SHEILA PEPE

WE Are PAPER TOWEL is Sheila Pepe’s first-ever staged performance and is presented in conjunction with the exhibition SHEILA PEPE invites SONDRA PERRY — Put me down Gently: A Cooler Place + I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That, on view at DiverseWorks June 11 – August 6, 2016.

Spinning out from her normative role as lecturer, artist talk-er and teacher, Pepe will perform a building. Think of it as an architectural drawing of/for culture, constructed with parts simultaneously personal and shared, political and possibly even Political.

Saturday, June 18, 3 pm
Matchbox 1
Free. Limited Seating. Reservations highly encouraged.
Reserve tickets at matchouston.org.

Sheila Pepe has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad in solo and group exhibitions as well as collaborative projects. Venues for Pepe’s many solo exhibitions include the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina. Her work has been included in important group exhibitions such as the first Greater New York at PS1/MoMA; Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art & Craft, Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Texas; and Artisterium, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia. Pepe’s work was recently featured in the exhibition, Queer Threads, at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art in New York. Recent commissions include work for the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale and the ICA/Boston’s traveling exhibition, Fiber: Sculpture 1960-present.

Pepe is also known as an educator who likes to trespass the boundaries of fixed disciplines in art and design. She has taught since 1995—for many years as adjunct faculty in a variety of programs and schools including Brandeis University, Bard College, RISD, VCU, and Williams College—until 2006, when she took a full-time position at Pratt Institute as the Assistant Chair of Fine Arts. Her own artistic development was a mix of academic training and non-degree granting residencies: BFA, Massachusetts College of Art, 1983; Haystack School, 1984; Skowhegan School, 1994; MFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1995; and Radcliffe Institute, 1998–99. Pepe was a resident faculty member at Skowhegan School in 2013. Spring 2016 appointments include Core Critic in Painting + Printmaking at Yale University and Resident Artist at SUNY Purchase, NY.