Creatives in Practice: Toni Pepe

One factor that gravitates the subsequent technology of artists to Boston University College of Fine Arts? Knowing that their professors, advisors, and mentors are additionally working artists, gaining real-world expertise and bringing that again into the classroom by their curriculum, classes, and talks. In CFA’s Creatives in Practice sequence, your favourite CFA school and workers members share the work they’re doing off campus, domestically, nationally, and globally.

Just like her dad’s storage, full of knick-knacks and devices, Pepe’s studio accommodates packing containers and packing containers of classic images. A photographer and visible artist who’s had greater than 10 solo exhibitions and 45 group exhibitions, Pepe makes a speciality of exploring reminiscence, motherhood, storytelling, and identification by pictures, with a deep curiosity in photographic archives. In 2019, Pepe launched her ongoing sequence, Mothercraft, the place she makes use of outdated deserted press pictures of how moms have been seen within the twentieth century and incorporates them into her personal images.

In this installment of CFA’s Creatives in Practice sequence, Pepe, who was just lately promoted to the rank of affiliate professor at BU, shares her expertise working as an artist-in-residence on the Boston Public Library’s Special Collections, exploring the Women and Gender Issues Press Photography Collection. Through this residency, Pepe’s challenge, Can I Hold You?, focuses on the fabric lifetime of the images discovered throughout the archive. Pepe then rephotographs them to find what was ignored by editors of the time. Pepe additionally dives into how this work goes hand-in-hand together with her function as an educator, educating print media and pictures college students at BU.

Cradle, silver gelatin prints and maple

CFA: Tell us extra about your artist residency on the Boston Public Library’s Special Collections.

Pepe: As an artist-in-residence there, I’ve been exploring the Women and Gender Issues Press Photography Collection, which incorporates press pictures and clippings that doc girls within the media—as victims, survivors, magnificence queens, and pioneers. I’m drawn to the contradictions in these photographs, the place celebration and violence usually coexist, reflecting cultural narratives about gender and energy.

My challenge, Can I Hold You?, focuses on the fabric life of those images—the crop marks, handwritten notes, paint, and stamps that present how editors formed what we see. I rephotograph and work again into the pictures utilizing gentle, paint, ink, and folds to focus on what’s normally ignored. For me, the archive isn’t only a place to search out tales however an area to query how these tales have been constructed within the first place.

Recently, the Boston Public Library acquired two items from Can I Hold You?, one among which can be part of the group exhibit Revolution! 250 Years of Art + Activism in Boston, opening October 22, 2025.

From left: A Good driver, inkjet on Kozo with staple; element from Pepe’s studio; Murderer of His Wife, inkjet on Kozo with blind embossment, ink, and graphite

How does your real-world expertise hook up with your function as a school member at CFA?

My work exterior the classroom, particularly with photographic archives, strongly influences my educating. I spend time analyzing ignored picture collections and contemplate images not simply as footage however as bodily objects with their very own histories and tales.

This hands-on expertise shapes how I develop programs with a deal with materials exploration, crucial inquiry, and pictures’s function in cultural reminiscence. I design curriculum that displays my pursuits in archives and pictures as objects whereas leaving area for college students to usher in their very own concepts. Whether analyzing historic photographs, experimenting with processes, or discussing ethics and authorship, I intention to create an surroundings the place college students join their work to bigger cultural and visible narratives.

What evokes you about this function? How do you assume it makes you a greater artist and educator?

Teaching and making have all the time gone hand in hand for me. My studio apply and classroom work feed one another in ways in which hold each recent and related. When I’m working by a fabric or conceptual problem in my apply, it usually shapes how I construct assignments or lead discussions. Conversations with college students push me to rethink my strategy or see issues in another way.

This back-and-forth retains me from getting caught. Teaching helps me keep current, curious, and related to a broader dialogue about artmaking. It’s not nearly passing information alongside however creating area for trade, experimentation, and development—for each my college students and myself.

What recommendation would you give your college students about constructing a sustainable profession within the arts?

When speaking to college students about constructing a sustainable profession within the arts, I emphasize the worth of merely attending to work. Often, the toughest half is getting out of your personal manner—letting go of perfectionism or concern of failure and simply displaying as much as make.

It’s essential to offer your self permission to make a number of errors, as a result of avoiding errors can maintain you again. Satisfaction in an inventive profession hardly ever comes from checking off packing containers like exhibits or grants. What actually sustains you is time spent within the studio—the tinkering, discoveries, and quiet pleasure of creating one thing with your personal arms.

Those moments gas creativity and hold you related to why you do that work. So my recommendation is to domesticate a each day apply, embrace the messy course of, and do not forget that constructing a profession is much less about exterior validation and extra about discovering success within the work itself.

Any enjoyable information or different data you’d wish to share about this work?

I didn’t develop up round practising artists and didn’t have it on my radar as a profession. One of my clearest reminiscences is my dad, a repairman, piling me into the automotive the night time earlier than trash pickup to seek for something that caught his eye.

I watched him restore and refashion discarded gadgets in his storage, giving them new life. That storage was like my first cupboard of curiosities, full of objects—some sensible, some ornamental—all handled with care. Looking again, I notice that’s the place I discovered what it means to be an artist: to show towards the issues everybody else has turned away from and see the worth in them.

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