Cheryl Pope
ALL THERE IS
Front cover: Cheryl Pope, WHERE MY HEART BEATS (detail), 2026
Back cover: Cheryl Pope, ALL THERE IS (detail), 2025
Cheryl Pope ALL THERE IS
Monique Meloche Gallery
March 28 - May 16, 2026
Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker Essay by Shannon Stratton
Photographed by Bob.
Designed by Julia Marks
Edited by Staci Boris
This catalogue was published on the occasion of ALL THERE IS, a solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker
moniquemeloche is pleased to present ALL THERE IS, an exhibition of new works by Cheryl Pope. Pope is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose intimate studio practice centers on textile "paintings." Working with needle-punched wool roving on cashmere, Pope creates richly tactile works that translate the language of painting into fiber, using material, texture, and color to explore memory, relationships, and the poetics of everyday life. For the artist's seventh solo exhibition at the gallery, ALL THERE IS debuts a new body of landscape works that explore the spiritual and emotional resonance of the land as a site of recollection, silence, and shared human experience.
The artist began this series after a residency at the Contemporary African Museum in Marrakech, Morocco, where travels to the Atlas Mountains and desert terrain evoked an immediate sense of recognition and belonging. Upon returning home, Pope continued her journey to the Abiquiu region of New Mexico, a site that carries familial resonance for the artist, where summers were spent by her father and grandmother. Together, these experiences, while separated by geography, awakened a mystical stillness inside the body, initiating a broader connection to the universality of the landscape. While Pope's earlier works centered the physical body as a site of identity, vulnerability, and care, from her early work with underrepresented youth, to deeply personal reflections on love and family, to her celebrations of the female body, these new landscapes suggest the body has not disappeared but expanded, shifting from the visibility of the figure toward a more esoteric understanding of how human experience is embedded within the landscape.
Drawing from modernist painting, slow cinema, and contemplative poetry, the works approach landscape as a site where emotional, geological, and psychological states converge. Art historically, Pope draws from traditions that understand landscape not as scenery but as a living presence. Like Georiga O'Keefe, Pope's landscapes strip away narrative figures to focus instead on the inner architecture of place. The compositional clarity of Pope's landscapes also recalls Roger Brown's distinctive visual language, particularly his use of stacked horizons, simplified forms, and rhythmic patterning. Materially and formally, the works embrace a process of attentive listening. Shapes derived from photographic studies are reworked through memory and intuition, becoming compositions that emphasize rhythm, vibration, and the relational nature of color and texture. Unfolding in undulating strata, layers of ochre, sand, umber, and clay mix with unexpected bands of lavender, pink, sage, and deep green, suggesting both environmental time and a thoughtful color sensibility. The artist describes the process as closer to composing music than painting: each mountain functions as an instrument, its tones and tactile surfaces forming part of a larger symphony of land, light, and archeological record. Here, Pope's wool fibers act almost as sediment deposits, a buildup only achieved by slow labor - literal time embedded in material.
The title, ALL THERE IS, refers to a personal family story; words that were carved by the artist's grandmother inside the wedding band of her grandfather. These words are a small but profound gesture that holds both intimacy and universality, and a candid confrontation to the bare truth of it all: that beneath the layers of narrative, culture, and history, the land remains vast, silent, and enduring. Here, Pope translates the emotional concerns that have long defined her practice, from intimacy, vulnerability, caregiving, and connection into geological form, where layered terrains become metaphors for the ways love accumulates, transforms, and endures.
Shannon Stratton
Essay by
The Insides of Horizons
By Shannon Stratton
The striations of earth that are hidden from view tell us the story of deep time. Crack open a geode and we see a micro-version of that, the alchemy at play inside otherwise unremarkable rocks. Visit the Grand Canyon and you see the enormity of time in the strata that are exposed through the patient work of the river. The geode feels like a charming analogy for the psyche—a kind of revelation about the interior world of the rock, whereas the Grand Canyon feels more like the physical body, the land undressed with her stretch marks and scars exposed.
Cheryl Pope’s needle-punched landscapes are built by drawing out dyed wool roving like brushstrokes, literally building the layers of the earth by laying down strips of color on top of the last like a measure of time. The resulting pictures—abstractions of dynamic New Mexico and Morocco horizons in a color palette that ranges from the expected pinks and oranges to blues and purples, greys, greens and blacks—look as though she took a knife and sliced the face from the mountainside, revealing the earth’s interior record of time.
Pope’s current landscapes are a natural evolution of her earlier wool “paintings,” depictions of (human) bodies together and apart, linked through her process of needle punched wool roving that literally entangled the subjects through marks that must merge with the substrate to be stable. As she pulls back from the intimacies she had been picturing (anticipated motherhood, interracial love, and dancers in strip clubs), her new works position the viewer in a wild, unpeopled desert landscape with either the sun beating down on our necks or the dusk falling in tandem with a drop in temperature. The view is both dazzling and dizzying.
In Pope’s pictures, the land ripples and folds like cloth or sits in layers like agate slices. At a distance they are graphically arresting, but up close they reveal subtleties that create surprising dimension, whether it is the gentle wind visible in the manner the roving is punched in the sky, or places where a shape curls and drips over another. These landscapes jut and spike but also melt and drip. They are in a slow but perpetual motion.
In a previous conversation, Pope spoke to me about how spiritual the work was for her. And later, how much it was about beauty, a palpable subject that is amplified by her obvious joy working with color. When I spent time with her in person, with the work on view, I was reminded of the modernists who painted in the west. Agnes Pelton, Lawren Harris, even Emil Bisttram,1 whose vibrant color palettes implied a kind of musicality or enchantment. Pelton’s practice of careful assignment of meaning to her color choices, like a blue that stood for “devotion mixed with affection,”2 resonates with Pope’s deft handling of color’s relationship to mood.
1Transcendental Painting Group active in New Mexico 1938-1942 - some say 1945.
2Middleman, Rachel. "Outlying Modernism: Agnes Pelton, Theosophy and Gender," in Christopher M Scheer, Sarah Victoria Turner and James G. Mansell (eds.), Enchanted Modernities: Theosophy, the Arts and the American West (Somerset: Fulgur Press, 2019), p.65.
Cheryl Pope, TEACH ME HOW TO BE VULNERABLE, 2026
Cheryl Pope, TEACH ME HOW TO BE VULNERABLE (detail), 2026
Like Pelton, Pope has managed to do something very different with landscape. While the horizon line is very present, the specificity gives way to a suggestion of space that is not about representation but about feeling. Pelton wrote about her own work as “little windows,” pictures that opened “to the view of a region not yet much visited consciously or by intention—an inner realm, rather than an outer landscape.” Pope does something analogous—her agate-like mountainsides suggest this same interiority. And the color provides a kind of ecstatic pulse that positions those inner realms as being as phenomenal as the outer ones.
Cheryl Pope, ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT, 2026
By way of her material and process, Cheryl Pope manages to create a great deal of intimacy with a picture of something seemingly enormous and vast. She makes the land less of a subject to be admired at a remove and instead, brings awe into close range, into something palpable, something closer to the texture of hope. From this new perspective, the human body is gigantic and merged with the earth body; the wool roving linking the ecstatic skin of the earth with that of the (human) animal. This canny combination of roving and subject matter brings the enormity of the earth body into a conversation with the modest human one, a prompt to the viewer to internalize the immensity of the earth’s deep time. For me, there is great hope in that comparison. We too will undergo tremendous change that will reshape us, and the outcome will be beautiful.
Cheryl Pope, ALL THERE IS (installation view), 2026
Installation Views
Artworks
BETWEEN THE HEART AND THE LIGHT, 2026
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
32 3/8 x 34 1/8 x 2 in
82.2 x 86.7 x 5.1 cm
TO BRING DISTANCE HOME, 2025
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
57 3/4 x 122 3/4 x 2 in
146.7 x 311.8 x 5.1 cm
WHERE MY HEART BEATS, 2026
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
74 3/4 x 66 1/4 x 2 in
189.9 x 168.3 x 5.1 cm
WITH WIND THAT LOVES, 2025
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
59 1/4 x 44 1/2 x 2 in 150.5 x 113 x 5.1 cm
AS THROUGH THE HEART, 2025
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
35 x 28 1/2 x 2 in 88.9 x 72.4 x 5.1 cm
ALL THERE IS, 2025
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
38 3/4 x 53 1/4 in 98.4 x 135.3 cm
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT, 2025
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
62 1/2 x 128 3/4 x 2 in
158.8 x 327 x 5.1 cm
TEACH ME HOW TO BE VULNERABLE, 2025
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
58 7/8 x 62 3/4 in 149.5 x 159.4 cm
OF LOVE THAT WAITS, 2025
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
54 1/2 x 59 3/4 x 2 in
138.4 x 151.8 x 5.1 cm
Cheryl Pope is an interdisciplinary visual artist who questions and responds to issues of identity as it relates to the individual and the community, specifically regarding race, gender, class, history, power, and place. Her practice emerges from the act and politics of listening and recently introduces a novel material to explore the artist’s memories. Referencing the familiar repertoire of the French Post-Impressionist, Intimist, and Imagist paintings, Pope recreates deeply personal recollections that cinematically compose the silent complexities of beautiful and tragic oscillations between love and loss in our everyday lives.
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: Sports, Art, Culture, which originated at SFMoMA (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.
Shannon Stratton is a Canadian writer and curator whose interdisciplinary practice engages craft, painting, material studies, and artist-run culture through both scholarship and cultural organizing. She received a BFA from the Alberta College of Art and Design and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies along with an MA in Art History, Theory and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Stratton’s work often focuses on the politics of making, feminist craft histories, and alternative arts infrastructures, positioning exhibition-making, publishing, and institutional leadership as forms of creative practice.
Stratton is the Executive Director of the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency and previously served as Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. She is also the founder of the influential Chicago nonprofit Threewalls where she was director from 20042015. A frequent lecturer and contributor to exhibition catalogues and critical texts, her writing has appeared in publications addressing contemporary craft discourse and artist-run networks. Through her work as an educator, organizer, and curator, Stratton has played a significant role in shaping conversations around contemporary art, socially engaged practice and experimental arts ecosystems in North America. She is currently the Director of the Post-Baccalaureate program in Painting and Drawing at SAIC and the principal of the arts project, tête-à-tête-à-tête, a 150 sq. feet exhibition space for 2 viewers at a time.
Exhibition Checklist
BETWEEN THE HEART AND THE LIGHT, 2026
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
32 3/8 x 34 1/8 X 2 in 82.2 x 86.7 x 5.1 cm
TO BRING DISTANCE HOME, 2025 needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
57 3/4 x 122 3/4 x 2 in 146.7 x 311.8 x 5.1 cm
WHERE MY HEART BEATS, 2026
needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
74 3/4 x 66 1/4 x 2 in 189.9 x 168.3 x 5.1 cm
WITH WIND THAT LOVES, 2025 needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
59 1/4 x 44 1/2 x 2 in 150.5 x 113 x 5.1 cm
AS THROUGH THE HEART, 2026 needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
35 x 28 1/2 x 2 in 88.9 x 72.4 x 5.1 cm
ALL THERE IS, 2025 needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
38 3/4 x 53 1/4 in 98.4 x 135.3 cm
ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT, 2025 needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
62 1/2 x 128 3/4 x 2 in 158.8 x 327 x 5.1 cm
TEACH ME HOW TO BE VULNERABLE, 2025 needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
58 7/8 x 62 3/4 in 149.5 x 159.4 cm
OF LOVE THAT WAITS, 2025 needle-punched wool roving on cashmere
54 1/2 x 59 3/4 x 2 in 138.4 x 151.8 x 5.1 cm
Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622 For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com
