Visiting Artist Talk: Michelle Lopez

Join Tufts University Art Galleries and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) at Tufts MFA Program for an artist lecture with Spring 2026 exhibiting artist Michelle Lopez.

Lopez creates strikingly precarious and vulnerable forms that speak to the instability of supposedly fixed or rigid societal structures. Reinvesting in the political power of sculpture, Lopez similarly wrestles with the medium’s legacy, recasting minimalist and post-minimalist forms into critiques of capitalism, chauvinism, and other narratives of hegemony.

Michelle Lopez (b. 1970, Bridgeport, CT; lives and works in New York and Philadelphia) received a BA from Barnard College, Columbia University (1992), and an MFA from School of Visual Arts, New York (1994). She is Associate Professor in Fine Arts and head of the sculpture program at the University of Pennsylvania. Solo and two-person exhibitions have been held at CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2025); Ballroom Marfa (2024); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2023); Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (2019); Simon Preston, New York (2018); Alt, Protocinema, Istanbul (2016); Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Paris (2016); and Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan (2001). Selected group exhibitions have been held at Jan Kaps, Cologne (2024); Sarasota Art Museum (2024); Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); Protocinema, Philadelphia (2020); i8, Reykjavik (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2017); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge (2017); MoMA PS1, Long Island City (2000); and Public Art Fund, New York (2000). Lopez has received a Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Grant (2023), Sachs Program for Arts Innovation Grant (2019), John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2019), and New York Foundation for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship (2011).

Image: Courtesy of the artist and The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage. Photo: David Evan McDowell.

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