SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY.- The Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College presents Sheila Pepe: When & Where We Rest, a new immersive installation by Brooklyn-based artist Sheila Pepe on view now in the Mezzanine Gallery. On view through September 12, 2027, the exhibition transforms the mezzanine into a communal space for contemplation, gathering, and conversation.
Pepe, a Brooklyn-based artist known for expansive, hand-crafted environments, asks what rest looks and feels like—personally, socially, politically—and who has access to it. Pepe’s installation draws on diverse traditions including religion, sociology, queer theory, the material culture of ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, and the Silk Road.
When & Where We Rest includes a site-specific crochet installation that moves between the mezzanine and the Museum’s entry vestibule, alongside other crocheted and knit works; site-specific Doppelgänger wall drawings, continuing the artist’s long-running series that combines sculptural forms, light, and shadow; recent drawings that reinterpret myth, religion, and selfhood, such as Roman/Etruscan Animals as the Musicians of Bremen (2024) and Self Portrait as Gorgon, as Columbus (2024); furniture and furnishings including Roman camp-style chairs, Song Dynasty-style Chinese sleeping pillows, seating from her ongoing American Bardo series of kneeler-inspired chairs; a site-specific upholstered wainscoting that acts as a built-in pillow; and rubberized flooring that recalls playground surfaces, underscoring the theme of shared, bodily engagement. Together, these elements create a hybrid environment: part domestic lounge, part sacred space, part public forum.
Another key element of the installation is a broadsheet that serves as both a takeaway for visitors and as a visual element of the exhibition, wheat-pasted to a wall. One side of the broadsheet provides an overview of the exhibition, while the other is dedicated to exploring ways of thinking about sleep. Excerpts from Sappho, Walt Whitman, and Salman Rushdie are reflected on and responded to by fellow poets and writers April Bernard, Peg Boyers, Selby Wynn Schwartz, Aliza Wong, Moe Angelos, and Raffaela Silvestri.
Organized by Rachel Seligman, Malloy Curator, in collaboration with the artist, When & Where We Rest is the sixth iteration of the Tang’s mezzanine installation project, offering new possibilities for rest and discourse. Previous project artists are Yvette Molina (2023-2025), Lauren Kelley (2021-2023), Nicole Cherubini (2019-2021), Kamau Amu Patton (2017-2019), and Liz Collins (2015-17).
Sheila Pepe is best known for crocheting large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture made from domestic and industrial materials. For more than 30 years she has accumulated a family resemblance of works in sculpture/installation/drawing, and other singular and hybrid forms: sometimes drawings that are sculpture, or sculpture that is furniture, fiber works that appear as paintings, and tabletop objects that look like models for monuments, and stand as votives for a secular religion. The cultural sources and the meanings that are intertwined draw from canonical arts of the 20th century, home crafts, lesbian, queer, and feminist aesthetics, 2nd Vatican Council American design, an array of Roman Catholic sources as well as their ancient precedents. The constant conceptual pursuit of Pepe’s research, making, teaching, and writing has been to contest received knowledge, opinions, and taste. Among her recent honors, she is the 2024-25 Henry W. and Marian T. Mitchell Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
