[music]

Alison Stewart: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC, I'm Alison Stewart. If you've walked through Madison Square Park since Monday, you might have noticed something different. There are 15,000 yards of crocheted material woven, draped, enmeshed, immersed throughout the public space. It is the work of Bayridge-based artist, Sheila Pepe, her first outdoor installation. The park is now full of various abstract pieces placed among trees, pathways, there are plants, some flora Pepe wanted to plant as part of the installation, including species like bitter melon, sour gherkin, and morning glory. How did she do it? With the help of some 23 women who joined Pepe in her studio to crochet a community art gathering. Joining me now in studio to talk about the installation called Sheila Pepe: My Neighbor's Garden, which is on view through December 10th is artist, Sheila Pepe. Hi, Sheila.

Sheila Pepe: Hey.

Alison Stewart: Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Artistic Director and Chief Curator of Madison Square Park Conservancy. Nice to meet you.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: Thanks, Alison.

Alison Stewart: Sheila, you've had work shown in major art museums across the country. This is your first outdoor installation. How did it come about? Let's start at the very beginning.

Sheila Pepe: It always seems to start with an invitation, this time from Brooke, which was amazing, exciting. I've seen a lot of great sculpture in that park and I thought, yes, first, and then "Wow, this is exciting and a little threatening.'

Alison Stewart: What did you think when you start to really consider the scale?

Sheila Pepe: The scale didn't bother me because I've been making big stuff and so I could ratchet it up one more time. I had some confidence about that but being outdoors is very intimidating, especially in the city. One you have fabulous nature to compete with, and we also have fabulous buildings. I'm right there near the flat iron building and there's nothing more iconic for me as an artist than that building. The Steelix pictures of it, and for an artist it's just such a resonant place. That was the mission, it was to take on this idea of putting myself in a place where I almost didn't think I would belong. I guess I've had a lifetime after that in one way or another, so I had good training with tremendous support from Brooke and the whole team, tremendous support from this really great curator who knows how to bridge the gap between what you do know and what you don't know about public art. I had a great time making this happen.

Alison Stewart: Brooke, what was the original seed of the idea?

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: I had known Sheila's work. We commissioned outdoor sculpture for Madison Square Park Conservancy and we bring dynamic exceptional artists to that site. The park is 6.2 acres, there are 50,000 people every day. It's a teaming urban public space. One of the mainstays of our work as commissioners of public art is to invite artists whose practices can be stretched by new materials, new contexts, there's enormous vulnerability in bringing their work outdoors. This was Sheila's first outdoor public art project. She took type of materials that she had used before in indoor spaces, like in the hallowed spaces of museums and she transformed them for outdoors, for an urban public site.

Alison Stewart: I'm always amazed, I came to New York in 1988 and I lived in that neighborhood. I remember what Madison Square Park used to be like. Right now it is such a microcosm of New York City, you've got the dog park and you have the playground which I spent quality time on 15 years ago with my kid and you have Shake Shack. It's just really become an interesting-- I guess, because it is at that crossroads at 23rd and 5th, it just feels like everybody's backyard or front yard.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: I think that's a great way to describe it. Some people come to the park to see the works on view and for others, it's a first experience with works of art, and how amazing to have Sheila bring her work to all of these new eyes and minds.

Sheila Pepe: I don't have that history with this park but what I do have is just walking and sitting and watching all the different kinds of people. I am very fond of the nannies and their charges and knowing that they have a routine as a group and I think they hang out mostly on my lawn, on the Farrugat Lawn. I'm really jazzed that I'm in their home base. It's a really interesting mix of working people during the day and people who come in. From the top of the Scissor lift, I got to see all these different populations, bird's eye view.

Alison Stewart: During the installation process.

Sheila Pepe: During the installation process. It was like, "Yes, all the people are here, all the people." That's what I think New York's slogan should be, it should be "New York, we take everybody." That's my spirit.

Alison Stewart: I like that spirit. When you were thinking about your work, and this is a question for both of you, how were you thinking about the fact that people are going to be living and playing and being around it?

Sheila Pepe: Really honored, to be honest. When I work inside a museum, the way I work, the materials, the crocheting, the use of a very familiar craft tool, people from many different cultures, the interest is to reach out to folks who would recognize that, that this is something for 20 years, people have said, "Oh, I do that," or, "My grandmother does that," or, "My auntie does that," or, "My queer uncle crochets." It's like, "Oh." Then there's more to the metaphor from there. That popular audience is upfront now. I don't have to ask them to come through doors, they're there, I'm in their house. It's a joy to do that and then it's also an opportunity to talk about other issues that are metaphoric from that construction about connections, about joy, about difference. I'm learning about public art and our old-fashioned ideas, that it will last forever, and then in my mind, no, maybe not so much.

Alison Stewart: Brooke, when you think about crochet, something that is made which is deliberate, out in the middle of nature, nature has its own plants, what's interesting to you about that juxtaposition?

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: Typically, Sheila has installed her work inside, in hallowed spaces of museums and galleries. There would be a verticality to that work. Now she's made a canopy that's horizontal, that parallels the sky. That's an exceptional transformation of her practice and her project. I also like to think of the work about what we can see and what we can't see. We can see the brilliant colorways of the piece, the cascades of the crochet, the lattice-like drawing in space that she made that then becomes three-dimensional. What you can't see is the intensity of the labor that goes behind the creation of that work and how Sheila convened in her studio across the winter months in the run-up to the project, novice and expert crocheters, groups of queer crocheters, all towards the goal of creating this work together and coming together in community.

Sheila Pepe: I'm so glad you said that because that's one of the main metaphors of the work in this instance. There's tons of work that's done every day by people, often by women, that's completely invisible. When I just use the word crochet, which you can envision in your mind's eye and look up there, there's this grappling with the invisibility of it, grappling with the loss of detail. It's honoring that kind of work, that all work needs to be honored, women's work needs to be honored and labor, handmade things is something that I really cherish and feel like a conservator of. I know there are many other options materially, but we work with our hands. I align myself with other people who work with their hands.

Alison Stewart: I want to ask about the color palette. There's lots of bright orange and bright pink but then if you look carefully, there's also some very muted, cool tones. Talk to me a little bit about the choice of color and the placement of color.

Sheila Pepe: The color came about pretty quickly. I closed my eyes and I saw green, green, more green, a little bit more green, and a lot of blue on a good day. That's the ground I had to work with. I had worked with these colors before, once in a piece that I did in Shenzhen just to be bright and cheery, and youthful. Pinks, orange, lavender, red, just really bright heart colors, like the colors from inside your body, pumping blood and joy and both emotionally charged colors, and I would say not so natural. These are all made of synthetic materials that would be able to get wet and dry quickly in the environment and wouldn't get water logged in the environment. I like shopping with American vendors, shoelace companies, paracord companies, and that's all part of the connection of people working for me. Yes, I had a tremendous amount of fun just making crazy stuff that I was hoping would show up.

My fear is that, "Oh no, it's just going to be a little line in the sky. It's not going to show up." I feel like it's boisterous and hard times, man. It's a good time to be boisterous with each other, to be prideful with each other this month. They are very queer colors, honey. I just want to say.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: Sheila's materials are unexpected. Weed whacker line, zip ties, paracord, as she said, shoe laces, outsize rubber band. Our horticulture team worked closely with Sheila on the color palette to lovingly plant and train up the cables of the work, all of the plant materials that you mentioned earlier.

Sheila Pepe: It's a really huge part of the work. My fantasy in the beginning was to connect to the trees and that really, for so many, reasons wasn't possible and probably not too nice to the trees. I needed to connect to the program in terms of the architectural program of the place, and that meant growing things. I needed the piece to be grounded, literally, the post to be in the ground and to meet the place of the park. I do have fantasies that'll come up and engulf my work, take it over.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Sheila Pepe and Brooke Kamin Rapaport. We are talking about Sheila Pepe: My Neighbor's Garden, which is on view at Madison Square Park through December 10. How did you come to the name My Neighbor's Garden?

Sheila Pepe: Well, I live in a part of Bay Ridge where there are a lot of little gardens of all kinds. Some are almost completely paved and have one square of dirt where a fabulous flowering bush is growing out of it. Some are quite lush and people work on it over years and years. Some of them that I feel great kindred with are the ones that look like my work. Almost, sometimes I think, better versions of my work. They have strings in them and they have beans growing, and it's just every inch of soil is planted with something you can eat, which makes me feel like that's how my grandparents were. It's just so vibrant and so different. I hate to be a little cliche, but tree does grow in Brooklyn and a whole lot more too. The other thing is that I wanted to bring the spirit of neighborhood to the park, like we were talking about before.

Everybody's here and the place looks prettier and maybe I can't live there in that neighborhood, but we can all come and be there and claim it as one of our great New York City parks. The parks rule, man. I love the parks.

Alison Stewart: Brooke, when you're thinking about the park and you're thinking about the art because I was thinking as I was watching it, some people aren't seeing it because they're on eyeline, or to your point, Sheila, they're nannies and got to keep the little rugrat safe. If, say, you were lying on your back, or you're sitting up and you look at the sky, "Oh, look, what's that above me?" I'm curious about, just from your experience with all of the artists you work with, how do you find that balance between park and art?

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: I think that people come to the park and come upon work often by happenstance. Some come to see the works as a destination and plan that, for others, it's something new and unexpected and we say bring that on, because we want all of those parkgoers to have that inspiring or challenging or provocative experience of seeing what is public art and how an artist can stretch the boundaries of what is public art.

Alison Stewart: Sheila, you touched on it. Let's talk about the installation process. How high did you have to go?

Sheila Pepe: I think we got up to 30 feet, maybe, which is not that high, I think. I've been up at 30 feet before, but not in one of those lifts. They're fantastic, really cool. I like it up there, I don't know why. As a very young artist after school and before I embraced being an artist at all, I worked doing some roofing out in Western Mass, and that was my first experience. Then I started thinking, "This is cool on top of this barn." There's a lot of life experience that goes into being an artist, including having all these crazy jobs and so that makes me feel close. I feel like an artist who's close to other workers and I like that. That's why I like this installation process because wherever I am, I'm connecting and jostling with, the way you do when you work with people, the workers, the guys.

Being the girl, being the lady with the mustache, some of the guys are totally cool, some of them are like, "Okay, girl, let's see what you got. You like it up there, huh?" I got a sweatshirt from the guys when they left because they were like, "Okay, you did it." I have to say, I'm just trying to describe myself on the radio, there's a gender-bending aspect to the installation from the get-go. Just this idea that I would be on heavy machinery, 30 feet up with a crochet, hook in my hand, I just thought was the perfect humorous manifestation of all the beings that I might be. I like it that way. I like that sometimes I look like your grandmother and sometimes I look like your uncle. I think it's cool. I think, I don't know, that's utopia to me.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: The public response to that, people gather around, they ask questions of Sheila. Everything's on full view during the installation process. In a museum, you can close the door and install the galleries behind public view. This has a different aspect to it which is vulnerable-making for an artist, but it's also exhilarating.

Alison Stewart: I think I know the answer to this, Sheila.

Sheila Pepe: You can tell me.

Alison Stewart: How concerned are you with the deterioration of the materials?

Sheila Pepe: I'm excited about it.

Alison Stewart: I knew that.

Sheila Pepe: Yes. My belief is that art is for meaning and all the meaning that can come with something that is optically not so vulnerable in the landscape, it's making it bright and trying to impress you, but then physically engineered to be sustainable for the period of time but also comes with some question marks because I have not put the stuff out there in this particular way, in this particular environment. I do have a section of 30 feet in my super's backyard that's been up for a few months. I have a couple of months of lead time to see what it might look like outside. Nothing special has happened to it. It's the same color and all that stuff.

Alison Stewart: I was going to say, are you observing it and [crosstalk]

Sheila Pepe: I am. It's like when I do the laundry and I can look through the window and it's right back there. Eddie's the most fantastic super in the world. I want to shout out to Eddie. He's excited about doing it. He's like, "It's just an experiment. This is cool."

Alison Stewart: Shout out to all the supers out there. We are talking about Sheila Pepe: My Neighbor's Garden, which is on view at Madison Square Park through December 10. I'm speaking with curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport and the artist Sheila Pepe. Sheila, who was the first person who put a crochet hook in your hand?

Sheila Pepe: My mom. When I was between seven and nine, I got a lot of technical lessons in my life. My mom at home was teaching me how to hand sew, how to crochet, how to knit, how to iron, how to clean the bathroom. She would put on Herp Albert and the Tijuana Brass and we would run around the house dusting.

Alison Stewart: I think they used to call that home ec back in the day.

Sheila Pepe: Yes. I got home ec before the home ec. "These are all the things you need to know, Sheila, to be a good wife and homemaker." Little did she know. Some of it stuck and some of it didn't. In a way, it's an homage to that generation's understanding of what we need to know, and the support they gave me. They had no idea what they were doing when I went away to school because they didn't have that. The desire to keep align with the ancestors is very deep and complicated as I think it is for a lot of Americans. It's hard to do it, and be true to it through a profession say. Artists make meaning and the work changes. I almost was a conservator in another life, a museum conservator, so I know what all the vulnerabilities might be, even if you're made of stone or bronze, nothing really lasts forever unless it's really cared for.

I'm willing to see what nature does to it. It's like a canary in the mine in a funny way. I'm willing to see what we can reap from the piece in terms of what kind of material will come out of it, and how to repurpose that material in new iterations of something outside inside. I don't know. Work begets work, and it's cool.

Alison Stewart: Brooke, when you think about fiber arts, and art that sometimes people describe as crafts, I think that gets into whole gender things, but when you think about the power of fiber arts, what is it?

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: There's a history of artists, of sculptors who have used fiber as part of their practices. Sheila, I think has reflected on and drawn on that history of artists like Eva Hesse, and others. These are crushing times for women and for queer people. What Sheila does with her materials is transform the very nature of what is sculpture and what sculpture can be. That's incredibly powerful.

Alison Stewart: In our last minute, I did want to ask about public programming. Tell me what people can expect.

Sheila Pepe: We have some great artists coming to talk about the work which is really exciting for me because they're really smart people, and their concert is going to be happening I know.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: We have Carnegie Hall city-wide series that will be in July. We will have art talks in the evenings in the park with Sheila and other artists and a panel discussion. Lots of exciting plans coming up.

Alison Stewart: I'm hoping we get early snowfall.

Sheila Pepe: I know, me too. Can you imagine that with the bounce of the--

Alison Stewart: Of the white.

Sheila Pepe: Yes.

Alison Stewart: All right. Well, we'll pray to the weather gods.

Sheila Pepe: If there is, we've got a date. We're going to have coffee in the park with our big coats on.

[laughter]

Alison Stewart: That's a plan. Sheila Pepe: My Neighbor’s Garden is on view through December 10th at Madison Square Park. My guests have been Sheila Pepe and Brooke Kamin Rapaport. Thank you so much for coming to the studio.

Sheila Pepe: Thank you so much for having us.

Brooke Kamin Rapaport: Thanks, Alison. Thank you, Sheila.

Alison Stewart: There's more All Of It on the way.

[music]

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.