Winter Open Studios showcases the work in progress of fall Rome Prize winners and Italian Fellows at the American Academy in Rome. Visitors will explore the McKim, Mead & White Building discovering music, poetry, architectural models and drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture. It will encompass a wide range of ideas: identity and immigration; rivers and citizenship; monuments and feminism; untold stories of Black Africans in ancient Rome; musical transcendence; and the depth of ground water.
Participating fellows include architect Anthony Acciavatti, poet Jacob Shores-Argüello, musical composer Daria Scia, and visual artists Kimmah Dennis, Nona Faustine, and Sheila Pepe.
“Since the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s commission of My Neighbor’s Garden, I have entered a charged and ancient form of sculpture: public art. My world is irreversibly altered; I must disrupt my accumulated epistemic position. This privilege warrants locating new productive sculptural arguments with patriarchy, no more referencing domestic spheres or indulging in overly romantic Italian American identification. Things have changed; it’s all public now. Postminimalism, queer abstraction, and an early education in figuration will launch thinking anew. I will frame Rome’s long, ample history of public art to reimagine traditional materiality, from Etruscan bronze to Baroque stone. Of interest are those Italian sculptors whose neoclassicism propagated the nationalism of the Risorgimento and their US counterparts who came to study the classics in pursuit of similar ends. I cannot share their politics, but we’d all agree—public sculpture is only understood in person.”
News from the studio…
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American Academy at Rome OPEN STUDIOS
Winter Open Studios showcases the work in progress of fall Rome Prize winners and Italian Fellows at the American Academy in Rome. Visitors will explore the McKim, Mead & White Building discovering music, poetry, architectural models and drawing, painting, photography, and sculpture.
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National Academicians in the Class of 2024
The National Academy of Design recently announced that 28 artists and architects from across the United States have been elected, to be recognized for their contributions to contemporary American art and architecture. The annual nomination and election of National Academicians dates back to the National Academy’s founding in 1825 as the United States’ first artist- and architect-led organization.
They'll be a special Induction Exhibition anticipated for May 2025 at the National Academy’s in New York, NY. Details will be announced in the coming months on their website.
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Sheila Pepe Awarded ROME PRIZE 2024
The American Academy in Rome announced today the winners of the 2024–25 Rome Prize. These highly competitive fellowships support advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. This year, the Rome Prize—the gift of “time and space to think and work”—was awarded to thirty-one American artists and scholars, who will each receive a stipend, workspace, and room and board for five to ten months at the Academy’s eleven-acre campus in Rome, starting this September.
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Marinaro Gallery is pleased to announce their representation of Sheila Pepe
March 2024
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Summer 2024 Workshops at Anderson Ranch Arts Center
Lifting small quotes from original texts, Sheila leads a master class in her favorite studio methods of accumulation, construction, and “taking apart and putting- back together,” all the while subjecting outcomes to tests of complexity, legibility, and aesthetic resolve. Open to all media from metal to found materials to fabric, this class encourages participants to come with their own set of studio practices and concerns, but to be looking for an opportunity to grow and expand their work.
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Artist-In-Residence at Dartmouth
January 3 - March 6, 2024
Pepe was welcomed by the Studio Art Department for the 2024 winter term.
