Cheryl Pope is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work investigates identity as it relates to the individual and the community, specifically addressing race, gender, class, history, power, and place. Her practice emerges from the act and politics of listening, using memory, material, and personal narrative to explore the emotional complexities of love, loss, intimacy, and care. Working primarily through textile “paintings” made by needle-punching wool into cashmere, Pope translates the traditions of painting into richly tactile surfaces that emphasize accumulation, touch, and emotional resonance. Referencing the visual repertoires of French Post-Impressionist, Intimist, and Chicago Imagist painting, Pope creates compositions drawn entirely from memory, allowing emotional truth to guide form, color, and space. Works depicting couples, domestic interiors, scenes of motherhood, and portraits of women explore moments of tenderness, disconnect, anxiety, and desire, where figures often exist between presence and absence in psychologically charged environments. Recent landscape works depict rhythmic fields of color that suggest the deep interconnectedness between memory, the land, and lived experience. Influenced by artists such as David Hockney and Roger Brown, Pope uses saturated color, flattened perspective, and cinematic composition to transform everyday experiences into meditations on vulnerability and human connection.
Cheryl Pope (b.1980, Chicago, IL) received her MA in Design (2010) and BFA (2003) from the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, IL, where she is an Adjunct Professor. Pope has had recent solo exhibitions at Easy Does It Curatorial Space, Los Angeles, CA (2024); moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2022, 2019); The Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS (2022); Rockford Art Museum, Rockford, IL (2019); Galleria Bianconi, Milan, Italy (2019); Andres Guerrero Gallery, San Francisco, CA (2018); and Fort Gansevoort, New York, NY (2017). Notable group presentations include Get in the Game: Sport and Contemporary Culture at SFMoMA which originated at SF MoMA (2025) and traveled to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Pérez Art Museum Miami (2025; 2026); Museum of Sex Miami (2026); Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL (2024); Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI (2023); The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2023 2021); Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY (2023); Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI (2022); Weinberg/Newton Gallery, Chicago, IL (2022); Skin in the Game curated by Zoe Lukov, Chicago, IL (2022); Fountainhead, Miami, FL (2021); Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA (2021); Virginia MOCA, Virgina Beach, VA (2021); and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL (2020). Pope’s work will be included forthcoming group exhibitions at NSU Art Museum, Fort. Lauderdale (2026); Great Park Gallery and Project Blackboard, Irvine, CA (2026); and Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery in London (2026).
Pope’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, FL; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; UBS Art Collection, New York, NY; Joan Flasche Artists Book Collection, Chicago, IL; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Honolulu Museum of Art, HI; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA; Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL; DePaul University Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; United States Embassy, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; The Jackson West Memorial Hospital, Miami, FL; and The Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita, KS. She has been the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Public Artist Award, Franklin Works, Minneapolis, MN (2017); Selected Artist, Year of Public Art, Chicago Cultural Center, IL (2017); Mellon Fellowship, Kenyon College, Gambier, OH (2016); and 3Arts Award, Chicago, IL (2015). Pope lives and works in Chicago, IL and Miami, FL.