[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 172 (Wednesday, November 7, 2007)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2346]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        TRIBUTE TO PEPE DeLAPPE

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. LYNN C. WOOLSEY

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, November 7, 2007

  Ms. WOOLSEY. Madam Speaker, it is with great sadness that I rise 
today to recognize the passing of one of our notable activists and a 
conscience for social justice, the artist Pepe deLappe. Pepe died of a 
stroke last month, at the age of 91, leaving an enduring legacy to the 
people of the San Francisco Bay Area, across North America, and 
throughout the world.
  Admired by artists, art students, collectors and museums; loved by 
her family and colleagues; and appreciated by the disenfranchised, the 
underdog, and political progressives, Pepe devoted her life to social 
justice. She used her considerable talents to champion the causes of 
the working class and the needs of society's cast-offs.
  ``She was always on the side of the downtrodden,'' said her daughter, 
Nina Sheldon. ``She spent her whole life dedicated to civil rights and 
to social movements.''
  That her social activism melded with her artistic conscience into an 
exotic bohemian life had its genesis around 1931, when she was 14. She 
became friends with the artist Frida Kahlo and her husband, Diego 
Rivera, when he was commissioned to paint murals in San Francisco. Pepe 
became part of Kahlo's drawing circle, where, she once said, she was 
treated as a total equal, despite her young age.
  This experience, along with her father's permission to discontinue 
regular school, encouraged Pepe to travel to New York a year or so 
later to attend art school. She returned to San Francisco at age 18, a 
legal adult, and joined in the city's maritime strike, an event which 
had life-changing consequences to her, as well as to those involved.
  If the history of a war is written by the victor, then the history of 
a people is written--and portrayed--by its artists. Pepe did a series 
of paintings of the longshoremen who participated in the strike--
paintings which still hang in the San Francisco headquarters of the 
International Longshore and Warehouse Union. From that time until only 
weeks before her death, she captured poignant, comic and disparate 
emotions and the conditions that gave rise to them. Depicting the lives 
of the ordinary and extraordinary people of the working class or on the 
fringes of society, Pepe expressed not only the history of the time, 
but the social mores of a culture.
  But paintings, cartoons and lithographs were not Pepe's only media of 
expression. She also worked with words and spent many years of her life 
as an editor and writer for local ``alternative'' newspapers, including 
People's World, published by the Communist party.
  Although she eventually parted ways with that dogmatic organization--
by mutual agreement, she once quipped--she never lost interest in 
current affairs and politics, mostly recently holding up a sign as she 
sat in a wheelchair at a rally to protest the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
  At age 74, Pepe fell in love with long-time friend and fellow painter 
Byron Randall. The two spent the rest of their lives in Petaluma, where 
Pepe remained involved in politics and the artistic life. In fact, when 
she died last month, some of Pepe's works--many of which are owned by 
major museums and institutions, including the Library of Congress and 
San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor--were being showcased in 
an exhibition at the Huntington Museum in San Marino. Titled Pressed in 
Time, the exhibit features a taped interview with Pepe.
  Madam Speaker, it is impossible to contain the life of such a woman 
in two short pages.
  But for those of us who knew Pepe deLappe, these words are only 
shorthand to the memories of her long, successful and influential life 
as an artist, activist, and idealist who, in her own words, ``refused 
to take life lying down.'' The world needs more people like Pepe 
deLappe. She will be greatly missed.

                          ____________________