Carrie Moyer and Sheila Pepe, partners in life and—occasionally—art, met in 1995 at the Skowhegan residency in Maine. Now, a quarter of a century later, the two have returned to the northeastern state for their first institutional collaboration.
Occupying the middle gallery at the Portland Museum of Art (PMA), their show, “Tabernacles for Trying Times,” is loosely conceived as a kind of sanctuary where visitors can come together and worship at the altar of contemporary art.
The exhibition centered on a pair of works the two artists co-created for the occasion, including a sprawling, ceiling-mounted installation and a series of spiritually inclined drawings.
The installation looks like what you might expect from the pair: a network of woven fibers is connected by drooping pieces of fabric that have been painted by Moyer. It feels like the work of a spider viewed through the lens of an acid trip.
The other collaboration—a symmetrical set of illustrations depicting ornate eaves and cornices that together form a kind altar—is less obvious, but not less interesting. It’s what happens when two well-established artists meet in the middle and see what happens.
Shortly after the PMA exhibition opened, Moyer and Pepe sat down with Artnet News to discuss their collaborative process.
How did the show come about? What was the idea behind it?
Carrie Moyer: The genesis of the PMA show was that the curator, Jaime D. Simone, read Sharon Louden’s book The Artist as Culture Producer, in which I wrote about meeting Sheila at Skowhegan. [Simone] was tasked with programming artists who had some relationship with Maine. We’ve both been to Skowhegan a lot—I’m a governor there—and Sheila’s been to the Haystack School of Crafts many times too. So we have a great love of Maine and associate it with good things. I mentioned in that essay that Sheila and I had worked on some small collaborations together while doing residencies at Yaddo and at the Joan Mitchell Foundation.
Sheila Pepe: Most recently we collaborated at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, which is in Umbria. That was more focused because we already knew we would have the PMA show. We got the residency and then we got the show and it was like, “Oh, this is perfect.”
Did you apply to those residencies together?
SP: We apply as collaborators. The first time, when we went to Yaddo around 2011, it was like, “Oh, this’ll be fun. We’ll do a little collaboration and see how it goes.” We made our own work and then we did a few things together.
CM: It was very modest to begin with because we weren’t sure if it would work. We’d basically pass the object back and forth between the studios. Then we went to the Joan Mitchell Foundation in New Orleans and again, we pitched it as a collaboration. We were there for a month together in this huge studio, which was insane. And we were more ambitious.
You collaborated on two new artworks for the PMA exhibition as well, including the central piece, Parlor for the People. What was the process of making that like?
SP: This was the first time where it was like, “Carrie, can I paint? Give me a brush!” Then I would paint and she would say, “Okay, let me fix it.” [Laughs.]
CM: Yeah, I was the cleanup woman. [Laughs.] We have very different aesthetics. The works we made are funky and precise in certain ways. They feel like they’re made by a third artist, you know? I think if you pull any of that collaborative work into a space that was devoted to either one of us, it would look like it was a sibling.
SP: If we had a kid and that person made art, that’s probably what it would look like.
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Read full interview at news.artnet.com.
