Sheila Pepe invites Sondra Perry
Put me down Gently: A Cooler Place + I’m Afraid I Can’t Do That
June 11–August 6, 2016
DiverseWorks
3400 Main Street
Houston, TX 77002
Hours: Wednesday–Thursday noon–6pm,
Friday–Saturday noon–8pm
Since the mid-1990s, Sheila Pepe has used feminist and craft traditions to investigate received notions of canonical artwork, as well as the artist’s relationship to museum and gallery display. Pepe’s exhibition at DiverseWorks is a commissioned installation that serves as an open meeting space and platform for several events, including a new video and performance work by interdisciplinary artist Sondra Perry.
With an interest in carving out space within solo exhibitions for young artists, Pepe invited Perry to respond to her augmented reinstallation of Put me down Gently. Each artist worked autonomously, yet their projects were hinged by shared resources, the color blue, and an investment in improvisation within institutional frameworks. The exhibition evolved and two installations emerged—tethered to each other by ongoing conversations on craft, class, race, place, and screens of projection. Visitors to the exhibition are invited to use the space as a work/leisure area and to discuss issues related to race and LGBTQ identity within the installation.
Friday, June 17, 7pm
Sondra Perry: A Party With No Agenda
In episode 17, Season 27 of The Simpsons, after Mr. Burns’s continued refusal to acknowledge the hard work and affection of his right hand man Smithers, Homer throws a party inviting the gay men of Springfield with hopes of finding Smithers a boyfriend. A banner welcoming the guests reads “A Party With No Agenda.” In this directly indirect wink and a nudge of a performance, Perry and the audience will work through how ideology, didacticism, and abstraction are visualized through bodies and popular culture.
Saturday, June 18, 3pm
WE Are PAPER TOWEL: A Cultural Construction performed by Sheila Pepe
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.”
About the artists
Sheila Pepe (b. 1959, Morristown, NJ) has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC. Her work has been included in group exhibitions such as the first Greater New York at PS1/MoMA; Hand + Made: The Performative Impulse in Art & Craft, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Artisterium, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia; and Queer Threads, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, New York. Recent commissions include work for the 8th Shenzhen Sculpture Biennale and the ICA Boston’s traveling exhibition, Fiber: Sculpture 1960-present. Pepe has taught at Brandeis University, Bard College, RISD, VCU, Williams College, and Pratt Institute. Her own artistic development was a mix of academic training and non-degree residencies: BFA, Massachusetts College of Art, 1983; Haystack School, 1984; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, 1994; MFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1995; and Radcliffe Institute, 1998–99. Pepe was a resident faculty member at Skowhegan in 2013. Spring 2016 appointments include Core Critic in Painting + Printmaking at Yale University and Resident Artist at SUNY Purchase.
Sondra Perry (b. 1986, Perth Amboy, NJ) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works in video, installation, computer-based media, and performance explore black stuff and the digital abstraction of subjecthood. In 2015, the artist’s work appeared in the fourth iteration of Greater New York at MoMA/PS1. Other exhibitions include Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle (2015) and Brooklyn Museum (2016); A Constellation, Studio Museum in Harlem (2016); and the 2016 Core Exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, Ox-Bow, and the Experimental Television Center. Perry holds an MFA from Columbia University and a BFA from Alfred University. She is currently based in Houston as a fellow in the Core artist-in-residence program at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
About DiverseWorks
DiverseWorks is a non-profit multidisciplinary art center in Houston, Texas. The mission of DiverseWorks is to commission, produce, and present new and daring art in all its forms through innovative collaborations that honor each artist’s vision without constraint.
This exhibition is sponsored by Carlisle Vandervoort. This project is made possible in part through support from the Visual Artists Network Exhibition Residency, which is a program of the National Performance Network.
DiverseWorks Season Sponsors: The Brown Foundation, Inc., The Cullen Trust for the Performing Arts, Houston Endowment, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts