Artists

Cheryl Pope is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, installation, painting, and performance. Her work addresses issues of identity in relation to race, gender, class, history, power, and place, often emerging from the politics of listening and community engagement. More recently, Pope has turned to painting as a way of exploring memory, intimacy, and loss, referencing Post-Impressionist and Intimist traditions to create cinematic compositions of everyday life—oscillating between tenderness and absence, beauty and tragedy.

Pope studied under artist Nick Cave for twelve years and received her BFA (2003) and MA in Design (2010) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she now teaches as an Adjunct Professor. She has held solo exhibitions at moniquemeloche (Chicago), The Ulrich Museum of Art (Wichita), Rockford Art Museum, Galleria Bianconi (Milan), Fort Gansevoort (New York), and Andres Guerrero Gallery (San Francisco). Group presentations include The FLAG Art Foundation (New York), Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum (East Lansing), Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Virginia MOCA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Her work is held in collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Seattle Art Museum, Honolulu Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Poetry Foundation (Chicago). Awards include the 3Arts Award (2015), Mellon Fellowship at Kenyon College (2016), and the Public Artist Award from Franklin Works (2017).