What's the Pebble in My Shoe? A Conversation with Sheila Pepe

When we met for the interview that appears below, SHEILA PEPE and I spoke online via Zoom on account of the coronavirus pandemic. One might think that instant-access telecommunication might severely curtail the opportunities for small talk; fortunately, this was far from the case with SHEILA PEPE. When we signed on to chat in her studio, we quickly began talking about the "Roman Emperors Family Tree" poster hanging on the wall behind her, which traces the imperial lineage from JULIUS CAESAR to JUSTINIAN, illustrated by maps that measure the corresponding scale of the Roman Empire. Though I was oblivious to this at the time of our conversation, the timeline of Roman history figures in PEPE's 2017 installation piece, 91 BCE Not So Good for Emperors (Fig. 1), which name-checks the onset of

Sheila Pepe. Photo by Rachel Stern.

the Social War for Italian citizenship rights in a manner that invites comparisons to the United States of the immediate present. It's notable, too, that the title of the artwork is itself a multimedia construction, with the hourglass emoji calling attention to the imminent, rather than merely ancient, passage of time. We didn't talk about this. Instead we bantered about PEPE's interest in Italian history and her Italian American upbringing. Whereas PEPE's multidisciplinary art practice, which includes and often combines large-scale textile installations, sculptures, drawings, and found materials, has made her "a hero among the resurgent queer textiles scene in the United States and elsewhere," as JULIA BRYAN-WILSON has written, the family tree of Roman Emperors invited conversation about the histories that animate her work.¹ Somehow we landed on Hegel, and then remembered that it might be a good idea to start recording the conversation.

Figure 1.

Sheila Pepe, 91 BCE Not So Good for Emperors (2017). Braided derby rope, knit and crocheted para-cord and yarn, chainmail, and hardware. Photograph by Stewart Clements. Image courtesy of the artist.

Devoted readers of ASAP/Journal will already be familiar with the work of New Jersey, USA-born artist Sheila Pepe, who participated in a roundtable on "Queer Abstraction" convened by the curator Ashton Cooper, which was published in the 2017 special issue on Queer Form (Volume 2, no. 2).² In that roundtable discussion, Pepe offers a working definition of the topic at hand by explaining that "the need for abstraction is the need to own, to re-own, to re-fuck up historically existing languages through our own haptic visual nature."³ This engagement with historicity, at once argumentative and augmentative, animates Pepe's artistic practice. On the one hand, the mediums in which Pepe often works—which include found, homespun, and industrial materials alike—bear readymade histories of their own. On the other hand, the people drawn together in and by the creation and installation of her artwork likewise bring along their own "historically existing languages" to be exchanged, challenged, and fucked up anew.

Pepe's artwork is participatory; her large-scale installation work involves collaborations with museums and workers, as well as the spectators who engage in the heterogeneous environments they create. And much of Pepe's artistic career has been dedicated to the political, as well as the aesthetic, significance of collective making, from her collaborations with the sculptor Diana Puntar and the painter Carrie Moyer, to her career as an educator. But here's where the historical part comes in. To create a network of crocheted and knit yarn, shoelaces, and industrial rope is not to allegorize an uncomplicated family relationship. Rather, it is to create situations for plumbing the basis of any such relations, for interrogating—prodding at, making a mess of, and surpassing the limits of—the bases of collectivity. The Roman Emperors Family Tree does not tell the story of a happy nuclear family; as a diagram of power, its ties are bound by conquest, dominion, warfare, exploitation. These are the ties that must be untangled...