Jaime DeSimone Interview with Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe
Sheila Pepe (United States, born 1959), American Bardo, 2020, painted wood and mixed media, 36 x 54 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photograph by Alan Wiener. © Sheila Pepe.
Carrie Moyer (United States, born 1960), Humming at the Gate, 2020, acrylic and glitter on canvas, 90 x 108 inches. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York. Photograph by Alan Wiener. © Carrie Moyer.
Learn more about the artists featured in the 2020 PMA exhibition Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times and who are the focus for The PMA’s Friends of the Collection.
Interview conducted on May 16, 2019, in Brooklyn, New York.
Jaime DeSimone [JDS]: When I first started thinking about inviting you two to collaborate on an exhibition, what validated
it all for me was actually Carrie’s essay in Sharon Louden’s book The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life. You wrote about your experience of first meeting Sheila at Skowhegan [School of Painting and Sculpture].
Carrie Moyer [CM]: I was at Skowhegan in 1995 and Sheila simply walked into my studio. At least that’s how I remember it. At Skowhegan you're not allowed to enter people’s studios uninvited. She came in and was very, very engaged with my work. All of a sudden, and I was like, “Oh, my God, who is this person?”
Sheila Pepe [SP]: Well, I thought I was being invited into your studio, or else I wouldn't have come in; I knew the rules. But there was a mutual friend doing the inviting and I didn’t know it wasn’t coming from Carrie.
CM: Right off the bat, one of the great things that about meeting Sheila was that Skowhegan did not have a lot of older participants. Most people were in their 20s and we were both in our mid‑30s. It's very different now.
It was amazing to meet this woman who had been to Skowhegan, who was in a really different place with her work, and who was also lesbian. I felt like “Wow, I’ve hit the jackpot here.” So afterwards we became long‑distance friends. Sheila lived in Boston at the time and I lived in the East Village in New York City.
SP: We had these long conversations on the phone about art politics. We had very different ideas about a number of “art things.” We argued a lot; it was great!
When I would come to New York, Carrie would offer up her apartment, and she would stay elsewhere. Then we’d meet up to see shows.
We shared good deal of old‑school lesbian feminist politics, AND we shared an ability look at the breadth and depth of mainstream art history. Sharing both foundations was really unique.
Even still, we had very different relationships to art at the time. Carrie was doing agitprop and making figurative paintings. My politics were overtly embedded in my determination to walk around as what we’d call a “visible dyke.” In my work the politics had already been planted deeply in formal terms. I was making work that was both 2D and 3D[JD1] , as well as abstract and figurative. The idea was to conjoin formal devices seen as opposite – linking them through the phenomena of light and shadow. I was looking to address issues of difference and a-priori assumptions on a broad scale, the stuff at the ground level of politics. This meant Carrie and I had very different ideas about audience.
JDS: Audience as far as who was saw the work and how they experienced it?
SP: Just different ideas about who our respective art audiences were in general.
CM: Or who we should expect to be interested in our work. As a teenager, I was interested in abstraction and had continued with it through undergrad and afterwards. However, after I got involved in political activism, Queer Nation and the Lesbian Avengers, I became really interested in agitprop and stopped painting entirely.
My way back into painting was to think about queer politics through figuration. At the time, it was the only way I could imagine communicating ideas that felt urgent. My feeling was “Wow, everyone should want to look at this or know about this.” That was one thing we really disagreed about. I still was angry about the politics of midcentury abstraction. It didn’t feel relevant.
SP: Conversely, I had come up through very traditional education, a liberal arts foundation with long list of rather conservative art history ideas. I was exposed to a lot Modernism as a kid from Jersey, bussed to NYC to go to museums. My earliest work was mostly figuration, and then abstraction through craft – ceramics first, then much later fiber and drawing.
I knew that all of these different parts of making had been presented to me as battling forces. That there were many false dichotomies. By the time I had gotten to grad school and Skowhegan, I was really interested in showing how slippery all of these oppositions were/are. I was using a lot of Duchampian thinking when we met, and very sculpturally.
At the same time, showing up as a lesbian in public was my political thing, I wasn’t willing to only represent as a lesbian in the work itself. I knew that what I was after had to come through degrees of representation, abstraction being one of them.
JDS: You united over abstraction?
CM: Yeah.
JDS: Which is so interesting and critical to this conversation in terms of where you were going as individual artists, but also as collaborators. Thinking about what happened in the last 25 years that allowed you to get to this point when it made sense to start working together.
SP: The evolution towards sharing the common ground of abstraction took some time. It didn’t happen overnight.
CM: We’re both very engaged in thinking about it. When I first met Sheila, I hadn’t been to grad school yet. I got my MFA at Bard College after Skowhegan. Sheila had a much more sophisticated, theory‑driven practice than I did. We’ve often come at it from different points of view.
SP: Coming out of 20th century sculpture, a genre that includes everything and the kitchen sink, I’m naturally going to think about abstraction in radically different way than a painter would. Sculpture can, and in my view, does include painting because they’re all objects and that’s how you have treat them. My interests are very small “c” catholic. The reduction of abstraction to pictures, signs, signifiers is part of the residue of ‘80s and ‘90s thinking. In other words, one “reads” a painting or an object.
I’m all over the place and Carrie is very driven and very deeply invested in the long, specific history of Painting. She’s a true purist modernist, but she’s been messed up by her lesbianism on other subject positions that we share. (laughs)
The difference is that I came into the relationship steeped in theory and Carrie was like, “No, a color can be a concept.” I'm like, “No.” Later I realized, “Yeah, a color can be a concept.” Carrie’s approach to painting in more and more materially based, a position that sometimes intersects with my material sensibilities. We’re formalists most of all. We agree on formalism.
CM: We had a show together at the Palm Beach ICA in 2004 called Two Women. Just looking over the documentation, it’s interesting to see the aesthetic choices and formalist similarities between our work. I don’t think I was aware of it at the time.
Much later, in 2011 we did our first actual collaborative work while in residence at Yaddo. Next we collaborated on a series of 3D[JD2] paintings at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. At Yaddo, we were hedging our bet because we weren’t sure it would work. We thought “OK, half the day we’ll work on our own stuff, and the other half, we’ll do stuff together.” However, when we got to New Orleans, it was full-on collaboration. I don’t think either of us made anything of our own.
SP: Yes, at Yaddo, there was an awareness of how ambitious we both are and that ambition can sometimes turn into competition. We didn’t want to put too much stress on the collaboration and needed to ground ourselves in our own work.
I spent more social time with the other artists and writers at “camp” Yaddo. Carrie was really into being in the studio and painting; I was making handsewn clothing/sculpture. Our studios were close to each other and we literally would carry things back and forth. We made small relief paintings and a collaborative glove/object. That was a good start because both the objects and the objective were modest. We had a clear physical process and studio boundaries.
JDS: It sounds like at Yaddo, you were passing the object back and forth?
SP: Yes.
CM: At Joan Mitchell Center, we took the collaboration up a few notches. We had identical furniture - a stool, a big armchair, and rolling shelves containing materials. We lined up the shelves down the center of the studio, cutting the room in half, to create two small workspaces. We would literally trade things back and forth. At certain point where we didn't need the separation anymore.
SP: Carrie is a more meticulous craftsperson than I am. I’m happy to shoot from the hip with a variety of materials. If something needs to be fixed later on, it can be done. But, she’s more fastidious about making things.
I would staple gun something into place, and she’s like, “Oh my God, that's great. But I can I redo it?” I’m like, “Yeah, redo it, but just don't change it.” (laughs) At times we’d switched roles — I would be painting on something and Carrie would be building something else. The best part was that we would make a lot decisions using simple, nonverbal cues, and then discuss it afterwards.
CM: Yes, we have very different ways of being in the world. The first time we had a show together at the Palm Beach ICA, we in the middle of moving apartments. Which was way more stressful than having a show together. The show actually went rather smoothly.
JDS: Can I read you a sentence from the press release from that show? Because it reinforces something that you said. “Moyer’s and Pepe’s work…there’s no obvious resemblances. Yet when viewed in tandem, both artists display a clear interest in abstraction and the formal qualities of painting and sculpture.” Now I think there are obvious resemblances.
SP: At the time, no one would have thought to put the work together.
CM: In terms of the show at the ICA, I was using symbols and images taken from historical protest graphics…but using them formally as emblems to be piled up to make new sense or destabilize.
SP: The monumental fiber work I was doing at the time didn’t have a footprint anywhere yet. People were like, “Oh, that's interesting.” The fiber thing hadn’t taken off yet. It seemed like a totally different position, but clearly formalist in its visual abstraction.
JDS: Describe your reaction when you received the invitation from the Portland Museum of Art to have this two‑person show and collaborate on new work specifically for it.
CM: I was delighted, totally surprised. The exhibition puts a much bigger frame around something that had been a sidebar. It gives us the chance to be much more ambitious. The most recent collaboration, from our time at the Joan Mitchell Center, consists of sculptural wall pieces. Now, we’re thinking in a completely different way.
SP: It’s really great to have this invitation from the PMA to collaborate in public while also having singular works made by each of us buttressing that experience.
I have to confess that when we started collaborating at Yaddo, it was a fun way to be out of the city and be in the same place at the same time. Now, it’s grown up to be its own thing, which I never expected.
CM: Neither did I, but it has. The collaborative centerpiece of Tabernacles for Trying Times allows us to think about things that we’re both interested in. There are shared spiritual underpinnings in our work have to do with access and community. We’re hopeful that different kinds of relationships with the audience will come out of this show. For the past ten years or so, I’ve only been making paintings that tend to be shown in a museum or gallery.
SP: I know exactly what you’re talking about in terms of the changing relationships of galleries, but you mean actually making a space?
CM: Yes. You do this in your work. I haven’t done this with my work. We both got really excited about the height of the center gallery. Plus, we get to think about things that are important to us beyond the commercial art world. That's been really great.
JDS: I was so intrigued when you proposed activating the central gallery and inviting the audience to participate. You’re using abstraction to start a conversation about art and the world we live in today.
CM: Honestly when Sheila started talking about tabernacles, it was very off-putting to me. I wasn't raised religious at all.
JDS: It’s a loaded word.
CM: It's a loaded word but, when used in the phrase “Tabernacle for Trying Times,” it’s funny and even sweet. The other thing that we both really love – and Sheila is particularly good at this ‑‑ are these funny, complex, punning titles.
SP: With a lot of alliteration.
CM: It’s important to us that this show becomes a place where we can acknowledge that we’re in a difficult time historically and gain sustenance as a community.
SP: The work of Carrie that brought people together happened mostly on the street in the form of agitprop. Mine has happened inside the gallery, with very few exceptions. And not just “the gallery,” but the gallery of an institution, of a museum of some kind. Those have been my places. Our speech is contingent upon speaking in and to those places. We are conjoining efforts here.
CM: One of the things our work shares is a populist undercurrent. In other words, we want people to have access to our work. Although the work operates on many different theoretical and conceptual levels, we don’t value obscure language any more than other ways of communicating.
SP: We’re both people who have pretty working‑class roots. While we had support or tolerance from our families, they didn't have a lot of insight into how make a life with art at the center.
We had to find our own ways and lean on each other for that. Knowing that anybody can come into this practice is a big part of the give‑back. That’s my relationship to museums. They became my church, if you will, with all the incumbent problems a church might have.
JDS: Yes. Church is community.
SP: I was raised as a 2nd Vatican Council Catholic. The 2nd Vatican Council was a time of reform when the Catholic church literally turned around to face the people. It was much more about social justice and real secular concerns. Although her immediate family wasn’t religious, Carrie’s parents were raised in Protestant environments, i.e. the American Midwest in the 1940s and 50s. She’s also a long-time New Yorker, and her first community in New York was based in local LGBT politics, and specifically lesbian activism, in the '80s and '90s. There is real convergence in many ways, but we are always negotiating cultural differences.
JDS: This space—your tabernacle—you’re hoping visitors bring their personal experiences to it. Right now, we’re all feeling weighed down. What you’re hoping is that, through participation, art can be a vehicle and a voice?
CM: For me, this collaboration is an expression of desires that have shown up in different locations throughout my art career. On the one hand, I want to do something that acknowledges the fact that lesbians are never depicted in mainstream culture and use it as a vehicle to question why that is. On the other hand, my—Sheila will tell you hers—first power‑of‑art experience was being taken to the Detroit Institute of Art at a very young age and seeing the Diego Rivera Detroit Industry mural cycle. There’s something very energizing and populist about it.
Sheila, what was your art moment?
SP: It was a combination of things. I was a child in North Jersey in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There was a program to take all the kids from the suburbs, across bridges and tunnels, and show us culture in the form of “high art.”
I heard “Peter and the Wolf,” at Lincoln Center, and I’m pretty sure Leonard Bernstein directed it. We went to the opera there as well. Imagine the Metropolitan Opera house, filled completely with noisy children and their teachers. Simultaneously the visual art part came in the form of trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. The Modern was first and foremost the most impactful. It was the museum that we were brought to most frequently.
I’m guessing thousands of kids around the Tri‑State area (NY, NJ, CT), had this experience, so it was both personal and part of my assimilation into a shared culture. I remember seeing the screaming horse in Picasso’s Guernica. I’d never seen a horse scream before, the emotional impact was alarming. And I was in awe of the size of it. Then, and on subsequent visits, I could never get close enough to adequately feel its size or see its surface. I’d get in trouble a lot with the guards.
JDS: This tabernacle is creating an arena for activity for the community. Some of the descriptions you’ve been using in your own reflections—this personal and shared experience, this in‑betweenness, this community—is that what you hope to accomplish with the new work?
SP: For me, it’s really important that everybody has an opportunity to think of their local museum as THEIR place, like the German idea of the “kunstverein.” It’s a big part of what I hope I’ve made with various installations over the past 20 or so years. But it’s also why I keep memberships up at my favorite local museums. I like knowing I can just walk in any time (and that every time I do the price gets cheaper and cheaper).
But also—and this is very important—museums are places of reflection as much as social engagement. Carrie and I have spent a lot of time seeing art together-and alone- trying to have an experience like that. It’s harder and harder to have a more reflective time in museums than it used to be.
CM: We’re thinking a lot of about feelings we’ve had or heard since Trump was elected. On the one hand, there’s been a real effort to empower marginalized people to express their identities. On the other hand, as somebody who’s been involved in a particular slice of this fight for a long time, I find myself feeling the kind of identity politics I advocated as a younger person was right for that time. Now it’s “How do we think together as a group?” That’s one of our goals with this project
To use the words “trying times” is not necessarily about trying to be a Democrat right now. It’s about just trying. It’s a very trying time. Sheila has used the term “big tent” a lot in terms of the show.
SP: I’m “big tent” about everything. About education, about culture, and in some way, even about politics. The “big tent” is a place of difference. So much is at risk when everyone maintains social media-style separateness. When we’re not able to read each other’s cultures or be curious about difference—teach and learn from each other—without being called a troll -we surely have “trying times.”
“Trying times” is just a polite and old‑fashioned way to say things s*ck. They seem to s*ck equally no matter where you’re at on the political spectrum. It just s*cks for everybody. It’s time to try to figure out a way to change together. There’s a kind of well‑intentioned earnestness about it, so it may fail.
CM: Also, the exhibition is a manifestation of shared feelings about museums which have functioned as places of personal liberation for each of us. This is a place where I can aspire to and also learn from.
SP: My years in Massachusetts taught me the value of what I call “Yankee tolerance.” It’s something we might bring back because, clearly, we can’t agree on everything. And that's the point. It’s just a wild luxury to imagine that everyone can or should be of the same mind. Understanding is a real goal, but simple mutual respect that includes pragmatic friction can be a powerful thing.
JDS: I’m also attracted to your feminist principles and concepts, and how those evolved in your lives and practices.
SP: There were times when the words lesbian and feminist never got said together. My life wasn’t touched by AIDS because I was so deep inside of the lesbian feminist thing, to a point of being separatist for a few years. I literally didn’t know any men. My father, my brother, my brother‑in‑law. They both were familiar and remote. I soon realized that wouldn’t work. (laughs)
Everyone carries their own intersectionality, but there are times when it's more important for me to be a feminist then a lesbian. I have a lot of relationships with straight women whose oppression is radically different than my own, but equally problematic.
CM: I remember hearing my mother use the words “women’s liberation” when I was about nine years old. She was very good about instilling feminist values in me and my sister. And I have been self-identifying as a feminist ever since—which has caused me a fair amount of grief throughout my life, especially in academia as both a student and faculty member. When I was an undergrad at Pratt Institute, I interned at Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, the first magazine of its kind. So, I had excellent training from some very fierce women. At this point feminism is really the foundation of my world view.
JDS: Starting with the residencies that you've done together, you’ve made very conscious decisions leading up to this exhibition. Now we're going to recollect, present and celebrate those collaborative experiments side-by-side with your individual work.
CM: Yes, this is so unusual. It feels like you’re giving us a huge present with a bow on the top. Many artists are in relationships with other artists. It’s a biographical fact that doesn’t get revealed very often to audiences.
SP: I remember when we first met, we thought, “Oh my God, how are we going to do this?” Neither one of us wanted to be Elaine de Kooning. We’re both really ambitious. We do different things. That’s good. I remember talking about Leon and...
CM: Leon Golub and Nancy Spero.
SP: They were people we’d met and were a pretty good model, because both were really great artists. Everybody knew them as individual artists. They worked on the other side of a wall from each other and created a vibrant community of people around their work. This is not to say that Nancy’s career didn’t suffer from the art world’s embedded sexism before the Feminist Art Movement of the late 70s.
CM: It’s great because the concept of the show also messes with the 20th century ideal of the singular artist with the singular vision. This has been a core tenet in everything from Modernism to the art market to the museum programming.
SP: We’re messing with the model of how two artists can have an intimate relationship and careers. And how maybe we’re both Elaine de Kooning, and Elaine was pretty goddamn great.
This is playtime! Two artists who know each other really well are let loose in a museum. A lot of people might think museums are all about money and prestige, filled with expensive stuff. Then you turn such a place over to us and suddenly it’s not about any of those things.
Carrie Moyer & Sheila Pepe
The 2020 PMA exhibition Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times is currently on view at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York! This is the first major museum survey of sculptor Sheila Pepe and painter Carrie Moyer, whose work focuses on abstraction, feminism, and activism.
As a special perk for PMA members, MAD is offering a discounted ticket price throughout the run of the exhibition (May 22, 2021–Feb 13, 2022).