Fields, Voids, and Translations: Works on Paper and Textiles by Piper Shepard

Baltimore-based artist Piper Shepard (b. 1962), creates architecturally-scaled works, weavings, and works on paper inspired by the familiar yet complex patterns involved in cutwork, lace, and botanical imagery. She transcribes and translates the language of textiles into the language of art, which she calls “the ethereal textile.” Her materials and methods bring together opposing elements—light and shadow, the material and immaterial, construction and deconstruction—and constitute a meditation on universal concepts such as loss, insight, and renewal. This exhibition is in conversation with seen and unseen, the adjacent installation by Shepard’s longtime colleague, friend, and fellow fiber artist Anne Lindberg.

Shepard earned an MFA in Fiber from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia. Her work has been widely shown across the US and overseas, and has been collected by multiple major museums. She has received four Individual Artists Awards from the Maryland State Arts Council in Crafts, a 2016 Japan-US Friendship Commission, an NEA grant, a Creative Arts Exchange Program grant, and was 2016 US Artists Distinguished Fellow in Crafts. She has been a MacDowell Fellow and a Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Resident. She began teaching in the Fiber Department at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art) in 1994, where she is now Professor Emerita.