Piper Shepard’s artistic practice is as an engagement with cloth where she seeks to remove in order to reveal. Over the past sixteen years, she has cut cloth into lace-like filigree patterns, sometimes regimented in structure and other times according to a process akin to freehand drawing. Her process is informed equally by the qualities of the cloth—among them, the physical tolerance of the material itself—and the rich domain where that specimen intersects with its own place in history and memory.


Shepard’s work represents an intimate journey through the magnitude of textile, a meditation informed by the structure and architecture of cloth itself.


Shepard’s work has been shown at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; the Snyderman-Works Gallery, Philadelphia, PA; and the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery in Birmingham, UK. She has received four Individual Artists Awards from The Maryland State Arts Council in crafts. She recently received a 2016 Japan-US Friendship Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, Creative Arts Exchange Program Fellowship. Her work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art and The Museum of Arts and Design, New York. Since 1994, she has taught in the Fiber Department at MICA (Maryland Institute College of Art).


Portrait photo by Craig Dietz.