November 9, 2023 | 9:30 am – 10:30 am
Join us for a tour of “My Neighbor’s Garden” with artist Sheila Pepe on November 9 at Madison Square Park. Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Artistic Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator, will introduce the artist and her first outdoor exhibition. “My Neighbor’s Garden,” places colorful and optimistic canopies of crocheted material, as well as unexpected materials including paracord, shoelaces, outsize rubber bands, and climbing vines, and extends from the park’s extant physical structures such as light poles. In the months preceding the exhibition, Pepe gathered novice and expert crocheters at her Brooklyn studio for crochet sessions towards the fabrication of the project. Pepe will speak about the project, offer insights into the collaborative process, as well as situating the exhibition within the context of her career as a whole. The event will wrap up with a Q&A.
Press coverage of the exhibition:
Special thanks to Truth Murray-Cole for spearheading this event!
Admission:
- ArtTable Members – $15
- Member Guests – $25
- Public – $30
Not a member? Join today!
This program is supported in part by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
ArtTable’s Artist Talks are made possible by the Pollock Krasner Foundation.
Images: Sheila Pepe, Crane, Madison Square Park.
Sheila Pepe, photo by Rachel Stern.
About the Artist
Sheila Pepe was born in Morristown, New Jersey in 1959. She lives and works in Brooklyn. Pepe received a BA from Albertus Magnus College in New Haven; a BFA in ceramics from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The artist’s mother taught her to crochet in the 1960s. Pepe discovered women artists who were a generation or two older and associated with the feminist art movement–Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, and Nancy Spero–as a crucible to launch her sculptural investigations. www.sheilapepe.com
About the Curator
Brooke Kamin Rapaport is deputy director and Martin Friedman chief curator at New York’s Madison Square Park Conservancy, which she joined in 2013. She was commissioner and curator of the 2019 United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with the exhibition Martin Puryear: Liberty/Liberta. A major catalogue published by Gregory R. Miller accompanied the Venice exhibition. At Madison Square Park Conservancy, she is responsible for the outdoor public sculpture program of commissioned work by contemporary artists including Diana AI-Hadid, Tony Cragg, Abigail DeVille, Leonardo Drew, Teresita Fernandez, Maya Lin, Josiah McElheny, Martin Puryear, Erwin Redl, Arlene Shechet, and Krzysztof Wodiczko. She is the founder of Public Art Consortium, a national initiative of museum, public art, and sculpture park colleagues launched in 2017. Rapaport was a curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum and a guest curator at The Jewish Museum. She sits on the boards of three artist-endowed foundations and the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College.