While earning her BFA, she participated in the Boston
feminist and
lesbian communities, while working at the restaurant Beetle's Lunch. In 1983, she moved to rural Western Massachusetts and was involved with folk artists and feminist activists such as
Diana Davies and
Kathleen Van Deurs. In 1985, she began working as a gallery guard at
Smith College Museum of Art in
Northampton. In 1986 she was awarded a position as the
National Endowment for the Arts Curatorial Intern and continued working there as a preparer's assistant, under David Dempsey, until 1989. Pepe made little work during the mid-1980s, but in 1988 while working with art at
Smith College, she began to sew dolls, which were shown and sold in Northampton. In 1992, she began her MFA work at the
School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, exploring video, performance, and sculpture comprising a highly feminist practice. During this time, an ongoing project called the "Doppelganger Series" was begun. This prompted her first solo show was at 88 Room in the
Allston Mall in 1994.
Work From the Doppelganger Series consisted of constructions or assemblages whose shadows cast on the wall serve as prompts for wall drawings. This process draws from the Surrealist automatic drawing exercise,
exquisite corpse. . Pepe's break into the art world began with inclusion into a 1996 group exhibition of Boston area artists at
Rose Art Museum and in "Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late 20th Century Art" at the
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 1997. Her more recent work can be exemplified by her installation "Mind the Gap," 2005, at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. "Mind the Gap" was a site-specific sculptural work responding to the architecture of the gallery where shoelaces and nautical toe-line were intertwined and webbed throughout the space. This work instigated a dialogue between domestic and industrial materials and responded to a 1982 installation "Boa" by
Judy Pfaff in the same place. Her 2007 piece,
Mr. Slit, plays with binary notions of gender in its depiction of a giant vagina made from crocheted shoelaces, rubber, and hardware scraps. In 2014, her piece
Put Me Down Gently was included in the show
Fiber: Sculpture 1960-Present at the
Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. She has won awards including the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Traveling Scholarship, 1998, and the
Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation award, 2001. She has taught art in many school throughout Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia since 1985. She currently holds an administrative position at
Pratt Institute in Brooklyn as the acting assistant dean of the school of fine arts. Her works are held in public collections including the
Fogg Art Museum of
Harvard University and
Goldman Sachs. Pepe is one of 120 artists to be featured in the
Metropolitan Museum's 2016 series "The Artist Project," a series of video essays in six seasons about works or installations at the Met museum. In 2023, Pepe created her first outdoor exhibition, "My Neighbor’s Garden," which opened on June 26 in
Madison Square Park in New York. In 2024 Pepe was awarded the
Rome Prize in Visual Art at the
American Academy in Rome. == References ==