“My favorite thing is crocheting 20 feet in the air,” the artist Sheila Pepe said at her studio in the Brooklyn Army Terminal.
“Up high, in my overalls and my crochet hook in hand, on top of a drivable scissor lift, it’s the funniest gender joke in the world for me,” said the 63-year-old artist, who identifies as lesbian.
Now you’re Uncle Joe!”For more than two decades, Pepe has used the craft of crochet, which she learned as a child from her mother, as a way to “draw” in three dimensions and infiltrate architecture.
Using crochet in place of steel, Pepe has invited reconsideration of a humble craft done by generations of women and the painstaking labor that went into it.
Her grandfather ran a shoe repair shop in Brooklyn, and her parents owned a deli in Morristown, N.J.
Persons:
“, Sheila Pepe, ”, Joe, Pepe
Organizations:
Brooklyn Army
Locations:
Brooklyn, Manhattan’s Madison, Italy, Morristown, N.J