Pepe was making the rounds.

He might be usually confined to the comic stacks and the seedier corners of the internet, but for the time being Matt Furie’s cartoon frog- originally created in 2005 as a good natured stoner before being absorbed by the internet at large, then notoriously co-opted by white supremacists during the 2016 election- was all over the place.

A stuffed Pepe lounged on a Chesterfield in front of a steamer trunk hosting cups of wine and plates full of grapes. A pair of kids and some adults scribbled the frog with various art supplies; people made Pepes out of yarn and construction paper. The first thing everyone saw upon arriving was a glowing digital easel displaying a slideshow of Rare Pepes – endlessly memed variations of the character by internet artists, ranging from impressively rendered stylistic parodies of artists like Jean Paul Basquiat and Shepherd Fairey to crudely drawn, stupid looking inside jokes.