Toni Pepe’s Mothercraft is an ongoing body of work that reexamines 20th-century press photographs of motherhood in U.S. media, revealing movement, both socially and politically, as records of the shifting identity of motherhood and women’s liberation, and durationally as physical images that were held, touched and eventually abandoned. This work is currently on display with the traveling exhibition A Yellow Rose Project at the Griffin Museum of Photography at its Winchester galleries from October 2nd through November 30th. We had the opportunity to chat with Toni, and her responses are as follows.
Toni Pepe constructs prints and three-dimensional assemblages from discarded newspaper images, family snapshots, and obsolete photographic equipment to explore how photography shapes our perception of time, space, and self. Her practice considers the layers of information a print can impart to the viewer beyond the image. Whether it is the presence of text, subtle stains, or crop marks, each element offers a glimpse into the photograph’s journey and its significance as an object in the world. Photographic prints are more than static images; they suspend our likenesses and histories beneath surfaces that are continually transformed by the effects of time and physical contact.
Pepe currently serves as the Chair of Photography and Assistant Professor of Art at Boston University. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including at Blue Sky Gallery, the Center for Photography at Woodstock and The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA). Pepe’s work is in the permanent collections at the MFA; the Boston Athenaeum, Fidelity, the Danforth Art Museum; Candela Books + Gallery; The Magenta Foundation; and many private collections. She received a MacDowell Fellowship in 2024 and completed a residency at Frans Masereel Centrum in 2023.
Follow Toni Pepe on Instagram: @toni.pepe
Allison Huang: When selecting these press photographs, were you seeking specific records of women’s liberation and voting rights? What drew you to each, and is there one that resonated with you the most?
Toni Pepe: I was drawn to photographs that carried both a strong visual charge and a caption that unsettled it—complicated, reframed, revealed something unexpected. My only search word was “vote.” From there, I let the results lead me. What held me was the friction: how an image said one thing, while the text pushed it elsewhere, made the ground shift beneath it.
The richness, for me, isn’t in any single photograph but in the gathering. The way repetition works, the way certain words or images return with slight variation, layering into a longer story about the 19th Amendment and women’s liberation. It’s that build-up—those echoes, those slippages—that give the history its weight.
AH: In Mrs. Nixon, you pin newspaper clippings and backlight them to emphasize the text. Why did you prioritize the text? Was it to reveal the language of the period, expose media bias toward women, or encourage individuals to see history in a new light?
TP: I’m drawn to the text for a few reasons. From a contemporary perspective, it reveals how women’s stories have been framed—what language was acceptable, what was emphasized, what was left unsaid. That language shifts over time, but the structures beneath it often persist. My aim isn’t to look back with judgment; it’s to show how progress isn’t linear or guaranteed. The text exposes the frame through which these stories were filtered and received. A press photograph is often imagined as neutral, free from bias—but once you read the caption, you realize the image is anything but.
AH: Has your understanding of the 19th Amendment, along with its intersections with art, activism, and even motherhood, changed through the process of creating Mothercraft? If so, in what ways has that shift influenced how you approach both your creative practice and your role as an artist and mother?
TP: Mothercraft grew out of my work for A Yellow Rose Project. What began as searching, as following a word—“vote”—turned into the impulse to build an archive. Not one that tells a singular story, but one that exposes the many ways women were pictured, described, and circulated through the twentieth century.
I began to think differently about the photograph—not just as an image, but as an object that holds time in multiple registers: the moment of exposure, the editorial hand, the caption, the years it spent forgotten. The prints I found weren’t preserved in institutional archives; they were drifting on eBay, abandoned, almost lost. That sense of fragility became part of the work.
History, for me, is accumulation, the layering and repetition of what we keep and what slips away. Mothercraft is my attempt to gather those fragments and preserve the traces that might otherwise dissolve into time.
AH: Mrs. Nixon was an entry point for A Yellow Rose Project at Boston University in 2021. Now that it’s showing at the Griffin Museum, does its return to Boston feel like a kind of homecoming, or has the work taken on new dimensions since its original debut?
TP: It does feel like a homecoming, though more in the sense of circling back and finding the work changed. Mrs. Nixon was an entry point, the door that led me deeper into archives, and the path soon opened into the Women and Gender Issues Collection at the Boston Public Library. For the past year I’ve been immersed in that material—press photographs that hold a complex, often contradictory record of women in the public eye. From crime victims and survivors to beauty queens and “exceptional” women in their fields, the images reveal two sides of the same coin, the violent and the celebratory constructed in parallel, often reinforcing one another.
When the piece first showed at BU, it was in the early days of Covid. I was one of the few artists who actually got to stand in front of it. That strangeness—of a show almost without an audience—has stayed with me. So I’m grateful for the Griffin’s return to the work, for the chance to see it again in a space where it can reach a wider audience.
©Toni Pepe, On Tip Toe, From A Yellow Rose Project
AH: Following up on the previous question, how does sharing this work locally enhance your role not just as an artist, but as an educator committed to critical dialogue around gender, politics, and representation?
TP: Showing the work locally means it doesn’t just live in galleries—it enters classrooms, conversations, the rhythms of daily life. It allows my practice and my teaching to overlap, for students to see how research, politics, and lived experience can be held inside an artwork.
The archive is never neutral. Press photographs, clippings, fragments—they show us how women’s stories have been framed, erased, repeated. Sharing this work with students turns the archive into a site of dialogue, a place to ask harder questions about gender, power, representation, then and now.
In that way the local feels essential. The work doesn’t just preserve history, it cultivates a habit of attention—a way of looking I hope my students carry with them.
©Toni Pepe, Vote Here, From A Yellow Rose Project
AH: Finally, Mothercraft explores how photography shapes our understanding of the past. How do you envision it evolving in conversation with archives, activism, and collective memory, especially as new historical narratives and social movements emerge?
TP: I think of Mothercraft less as a closed project than as a living archive, one that keeps changing as new narratives and movements come into view. Photography has always been a way of fixing time, but also of unsettling it—what we choose to preserve, what gets forgotten, what returns in altered form.
As I work with these images, I’m reminded that collective memory isn’t static. It bends, shifts, opens to revision. The archive, too, is porous—shaped by what it holds and what it leaves out. Activism often begins in those gaps, in the insistence that certain lives, certain struggles, be seen.
So I imagine the work evolving alongside those demands. Not as a definitive account, but as a site of dialogue—between past and present, between loss and possibility. A reminder that history is never finished; it’s something we keep remaking together.
Interview by Allison Huang, Curation and Exhibitions Admin Intern
Allison Huang is the Curation and Exhibitions Admin Intern from White Plains, New York. She recently graduated from Boston University with a B.A. in History of Art and Architecture and Biology, along with a minor in Visual Arts. With a passion for storytelling and audience engagement, she is dedicated to collaborating with artists to expand their creative potential while fostering more inclusive and dynamic artistic spaces. Her research interests include the work of lesser-known artists, the representation of marginalized communities in art, and issues of repatriation. In her creative practice, she works primarily with analog photography and oil painting.
Griffin Museum of Photography – Winchester, Massachusetts
