Sheila Pepe

She is a prominent figure as a lesbian cross-disciplinary artist, whose work employs conceptualism, surrealism, and craft to address feminist and class issues.

[3] Pepe received her BA in 1981 at Albertus Magnus College in New Haven, CT, followed shortly by a BFA in ceramics at Massachusetts School of Art, Boston, in 1983.

In 1983, she moved to rural Western Massachusetts and was involved with folk artists and feminist activists such as Diana Davies and Kathleen Van Deurs.

In 1986 she was awarded a position as the National Endow for the Arts Curatorial Intern and continued working there as a preparer's assistant, under David Dempsey, until 1989.

In 1992, she began her MFA work at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exploring video, performance, and sculpture comprising a highly feminist practice.

"Mind the Gap" was a site-specific sculptural work responding to the architecture of the gallery where shoelaces and nautical toe-line were intertwined and webbed throughout the space.

[5] Her 2007 piece, Mr. Slit, plays with binary notions of gender in its depiction of a giant vagina made from crocheted shoelaces, rubber, and hardware scraps.