Cheryl Pope

Pope received her BFA in 2003, and in 2010 completed her Masters in Design: Fashion, Body, and Garment, both at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.^[2] She spent 12 years studying under artist Nick Cave,^[1] and in 2015 she received a 3Arts award in recognition of her excellence in the visual arts.^[2] She currently lives and works in Chicago, Illinois, as both a practicing artist and a boxing instructor.

Through her work, Pope seeks to examine issues of race, gender, and other social issues. Pope's MD thesis, The Games We Play, featured a circle of tube socks that viewers could toss coins into. On each sock was written a word from Chicago teens that represented a binary. This installation also featured a sound component, where the voices of teens could be heard from a cone in the center.^[3] The work is a combination of sculpture and performance that calls into question things left unsaid.

Just Yell, an ongoing project by Pope, seeks to address gun violence faced by youth in Chicago.^[4] Just Yell is a series of installations that frequently employs poetry and performance by high school students in Chicago as a way to work out issues in a non-violent way.^[5]

In 2019, she created a series of works in wool roving, which were shown at a solo show at the Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago.^[6][7]