The artist was interviewed by Camilla Boemio in April 2025.
The exhibition The Spanish Steps, Revisited at Keats-Shelley House celebrating the three hundredth anniversary of the ‘Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti’ (2025-2026), known to the English speaking world as “The Spanish Steps”, draws in its development from two distinct areas of research: the historical and the contemporary. The group show is curated by Luca Caddia and Fulvio Chimento, in collaboration with Ella Francesca Kilgallon and Carlotta Minarelli.
The historical approach illustrates the events leading to the slope of the Pincio hill in Rome becoming the bone of contention between the papacy and the French court during the Ancien Régime. The exhibition includes architectural blueprints and engravings of the ephemeral apparatuses on loan from the Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, the Biblioteca di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte, the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica and the Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa.
Inspired by the history of the area, the curators also have invited contemporary artists and architects to imagine a different place, asking them: “If you could redesign the Spanish Steps today, what would they look like?”
The project benefited from the collaboration selected 2024-2025 Fellows from the American Academy in Rome and the British School at Rome. Among the works of the artists involved, the artworks of American artist Sheila Pepe stood out for me.
Public art is the focus on Pepe’s research in Rome. In the course of her Fellowship at the American Academy, she wrote “[…] this privilege warrants locating new productive sculptural arguments with patriarchy, no more referencing domestic spheres or indulging in overly romantic Italian American identification. Things have changed; it’s all public now. Post-minimalism, queer abstraction, and an early education in figuration will launch thinking anew.”
From this new vantage point, history needs to be re-written in an aesthetic sedimentation or by reframing composite histories with different protagonists, leaving behind a “passatista” or past driven vision of patriarchy to make room for a reading of the past in which women, queer, non-binary people can emerge by telling the real facts.
Camilla Boemio: Deleuze always said that art is a critique of cliché. What do you think?
Sheila Pepe: In the main, that sounds right to me. However, when considering public art, it seems more like a dance with cliché. After being in Rome in the fall, among thousands of tourists, it became clear that there was little room for critique with this crowd. And I’d have to include myself in that first blush when one sees something they’ve only seen in a book or on a screen. If you like art at all and have been raised on the western canon, you could turn into mush in Rome. But if your adult life has been governed by a loving but intense critical pursuit of new meaning, you snap out of it. For me, the harsh awakening comes with the nearly impenetrable sense of the patriarchal at every turn in Rome. Of course, I sense this again in the States, but that’s another story. My point is this, public art seems to require at least an earnest face of what is otherwise considered the cliché. Then, in order to avoid continuing to feed the idea that the act of making a totalizing statement is OK, there must be a twist, an act of self-sabotage by the artist. There are many routes to this, humor, shift in scale or visibility, and, of course, ephemerality. Art has become many things, but unless it critically addresses its relationship with time and taste, I’m not sure it qualifies.
Sheila Pepe, Under Marcus Aurelius, 2024 Rome, Ink on Paper, 23 x 15 inches
C.B.: What was your first high-stakes opportunity?
S.P.: That’s a funny question. They are all high stakes until they are not any more. And if an artist can’t frame everything, they say “Yes” to a high stakes endeavor, for their work in a new context, then I’m not sure what they are doing is in an effort to critically engage themselves and their audience. When I was young, it was about exposure. And sometimes I didn’t even recognize that opportunities where high stakes. For example, I was accepted to a prestigious US summer program called “Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture” but I had no idea how sought after it was until my peers were surprised that I was the one that got in. I’m more aware now of what I’m after – but similarly I meet every opportunity with the same delight, and hopefully rigor. For example, I still like to do small college gigs, it’s just I can’t prepare installations for them all, so I ask if we can make a group exhibition instead. I make something and invite two of my former students to show new work, and they invite two of their former students to do the same. We then use the budget for the travel expense to bring us all together for a public conversation. It’s a ton of fun and furthers a long-running critique of prestige. Of course, all of that said, winning the Rome prize has been a life-long dream, but it hasn’t felt “ high stakes”, it’s felt perfectly glorious.
C.B.: What was your most surprising discovery in Rome?
S.P.: More like a cluster of very important ones. The first time I was here was the summer of 1979. The difference is so profound, it simply reminds me of my age and all that’s happened since. Next, the city’s investment in its public art. It seemed that most of the great public sculpture was tented for restoration for the Giubileo. I loved to see so many objects conservators at work! And finally, my colleagues at the Academy. There is nothing as good as living and working with so many profoundly engaged and talented humans in one place.
C.B: We need to have new elements to re-write public art, it is essential to activate audacity and a sense of revolution; more now that in the past. The environment, landscape, and how the city grows in male power, the monumental sculpture and their subjects, they are in a position of contestation that we need to subvert. What do you think?
S.P.: I think I have answered much of this question above. But to answer more directly about public art “in general” we just need to stop putting so many new things in the landscape permanently. It seems to me that fixed monumental sculpture in shared space borrows too many of the tools of patriarchy– insisting on monolith thinking in space and time. I’m for temporary and ephemeral works that are mindful of the literal location. For example, in my “My Neighbor’s Garden” in Madison Square Park Conservancy in New York City, a large part of the sculpture was posts between which I crocheted lines and tents and drawings in space, but also significantly, held the cables for climbing plants to grow up. The horticulture team then curated the plants – ½ edible- ½ ornamental. By the end of the installation the plants began to take over the crocheting!
Right now, I think drawing does the best job of re-imagining public sculpture through its history. Space can grow or collapse in drawing and you can really play with known images.
Plautilla & Lupa Rule, 2025.
C.B.: Can you describe your representational choices?
S.P.: Yes. Representation is as close to writing as we might get for most of our audience, especially a broad public audience. Artists haven’t done a very good job at bringing a broad audience along to idea of “reading” materiality and formal choices. If you can’t read the basics, then any critical dimension is completely lost. I began crocheting in space in 1999 as a critique of admissible materials for sculpture, and to point to my Italian-American mother and the professional fiber sculptures of my youth, like Lenore Tawney. At the time there was some post 9-11 knitting (the northern sister of crochet). It was critique then, and it was critique as completely ephemeral installation for the next 20 years and may still be in certain contexts. But it needs a context to consider that, as do all forms including representation + drawing. Next perhaps is thinking about my “style of drawing” – but I don’t have a great meta view on that– yet.
Sheila Pepe, Marcus A Whole, 2024 Rome, Ink + acrylic on white wove paper, 23 x 15 inches
C.B.: Can you describe your re-imagining a different Spanish Steps (your project)?
S.P.: Yes, it’s rather simple in light of your earlier questions. It places Plautilla Bricci, Rome’s (Italy’s) first woman architect and very little known contributor to the design of the Spanish Steps, riding on top of Roma’s Lupa. Lupa rears, as in Bricci’s own proposed monument of the French King Luis XIV on his horse. I found this tiny drawing as well as her (presumed) image in the book Una rivoluzione silenziosa. Plautilla Bricci pittrice e architettrice. Ediz. a colori , by Yuri Primarosa. Of course, the text was all in Italian, but the images were not. Bricci’s full architectural drawing/plan for the steps is now hung adjacent to monument drawing in the case at the Keats Shelley House. Pretty thrilling! The subject of my drawing came up as a verbal description that Deputy Curator Dr Luca Caddia discussed in my studio at the academy in November. He entered a studio filled with drawings of the Rome’s monument animals without any of the men on top, or boys underneath. Most were stacked and Caddia was able to see that they were placed as if they were the Musicians of Bremen. He instinctively knew he could get me to put a human on an animal again – as long as they shared the gender ‘woman’ and looked like they were having fun.
Sheila Pepe, Roman + Etruscan Animals as if from Bremen, 2024 Rome, Ink and acrylic on white wove paper, 23 x 15 inches
Camilla Boemio is an internationally published author, curator, and member of the AICA (International Arts Critics), IKT (International) and part of board of Cycladic Arts (Greece) and AAC Platform, based in Rome. She conducts theoretical and practical research on co-creation, social engaged art practices and connections between art and science, heritage/history of art and contemporary art. Boemio’s recent curatorial exhibition include, TEN YEARS: BSR People 14 – 24 at The British School at Rome, a solo show by Antonio Palmieri, who over the course of ten years working at BSR has photographed the people who have passed through the academy, from fellows to staff, inventing characters and telling stories (2024).
In 2021; she edited the book The Edge of Equilibrium published by Vanilla Edizioni. The Edge of Equilibrium weaves a dialogue of many voices, rather than making a fixed statement, and offers a wide picture of art communities, alternative land-based, low-impact ways of living, which address issues and dilemmas relevant for an epochal renovation. The book was presented at Artissima, Roma Arte In Nuvola 2021and Art Verona 16. The book is part of the collection Getty Museum’s library.
