The Museum of Arts and Design’s spirited exhibition “Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe: Tabernacles for Trying Times,” on view through Feb. 13, celebrates the formal vision and feminist politics of two abstract artists who share an interest in glitchy beauty, vibrant color, and craft-store materials—as well as a life. Moyer, a painter, and Pepe, a sculptor, have been a couple for a quarter century. Married since 2015, they met at Skowhegan, an art residency in Maine. (The show originated at the Portland Museum of Art.) Moyer’s glitter-and-acrylic canvases—mandala-like translucencies that have earned justifiable comparisons to Helen Frankenthaler and Georgia O’Keeffe—look as rapturous as ever, at once aqueous and pyrotechnic. In Pepe’s rhizomatic networks of yarn, rope, hardware, and cord, the domestic art of crochet becomes a sculptural superpower. If the show’s highlights are its individual works, think of the couple’s collaborations as generous hosts throwing a party; the proverbial lampshade is worn by a gamely goofy homage to the nonagenarian trailblazer Lee Bontecou, whose aim for her art was “no barriers—no boundaries—all freedom in every sense.” The unfettered centerpiece here is “Parlor for the People,” from 2019, a hybrid of lounge and sanctuary, outfitted with textiles and furniture, beneath an extravagant, genre-defying canopy of clouds. (Museum of Arts and Design; May 4-Feb. 13.)
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