Large scale installation fiber artist Sheila Pepe addresses feminism and class to present at IMRC Center

Sheila Pepe is best known for her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculptures made from domestic and industrial materials. Since the mid 1990s Pepe has used feminist and craft traditions to investigate received notions concerning the production of canonical artwork as well as the artist’s relationship to museum display and the art institution itself. She is a prominent participant in lesbian interdisciplinary work, and explores topics of class and feminism. Her large web-like site-specific pieces often invite a dialogue between domestic and industrial materials. She is also known to work in sculpture and illustration.

On Tuesday, March 29 at 7p.m. Pepe will present her work as a part of Tuesdays at the IMRC, the UMaine Intermedia MFA program’s visiting artist lecture series. Her presentation is free and open to the public.

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, and the Weatherspoon Art Museum. Her work has also been included in important group exhibitions such as the first Greater New York at PS1/MoMA and Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art & Craft. Pepe’s work was recently featured in the exhibition Queer Threads at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Lesbian and Gay Art. To see more of Pepe’s work, visit her on the web at www.sheilapepe.com/

Pepe is also 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. She is now on the faculties Cornell and Yale Universities.

“Put Me Down Gently”, 2014, Photo credit: John Horner

Tuesdays at the IMRC is sponsored by the UMaine Intermedia MFA and New Media Departments, the UMaine Cultural Affairs/Distinguished Lecture Series, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Correll Professorship in New Media. Visit www.intermediamfa.org for more information.

Opened in 2013, the IMRC Center is a hub for learning, creating and producing. It is the most recent of the portfolio of the University of Maine’s facilities that support innovation and economic development. The IMRC Center is supported by a range of expert instructors and a community of collaborators. Visit www.imrccenter.com, where you can find information on the facility, programs and events.