Coming up this month, we’re thrilled to present two exciting programs highlighting the work and practice of TUAG / Medford exhibiting artist Michelle Lopez.

We invite you to join us for an artist talk on March 27 at TUAG / Boston and a thought-provoking sound performance starting at TUAG / Medford, activating the bell tower of Tufts’ Goddard Chapel in conjunction with Michelle Lopez: Shadow of a Doubt, followed by a student-run protest poster workshop . RSVP and learn more here.

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 will discuss the process and practice behind creating strikingly precarious and vulnerable forms that speak to the instability of supposedly fixed or rigid societal structures. By 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.

Through live and recorded sound, Keep Their Heads Ringin’ is a performance that takes on the complicated symbolism of the Liberty Bell as an emblem of freedom and equality, which is also marked with failure: the bell’s famed crack that rendered the iconic hunk of cast-iron broken and silent at its arrival.

First developed in 2020 at the height of the George Floyd uprising, Keep Their Heads Ringin’ was a physical and sonic intervention onto the actual Liberty Bell near Philadelphia’s Independence Hall.  Reconsidered for Tufts University and its belltower in Goddard Chapel in 2026 in a collaboration with Tufts University Chaplaincy, the sound performance and participatory procession invite visitors to move though campus together under a collaged soundtrack and newly composed score by sound artist Austin Fisher, asking us truly what freedom means.   

This program begins in the Aidekman Arts Center in the Michelle Lopez: Shadow of a Doubt exhibition. Together, the group will take a fully accessible 20-minute uphill walk to Goddard Chapel culminating in a live carillon performance. 

Following the performance, TUAG’s Student Programming Committee will be hosting a poster making workshop in the nearby Curtis Hall (474 Boston Avenue) for participants to use in the Saturday March 28th No Kings March in Boston. A group of staff and students will be taking the Green Line, just across the street from Curtis Hall, to Boston Common at 11:30am.

We’re also delighted to celebrate two exciting recent openings. First, the timely, transportive 2026 Whitney Biennial featuring work by two artists currently on view at TUAG, Michelle Lopez in Shadow of a Doubt at TUAG / Medford, and Jonathan González in Magical Thinking, of Systems and Beliefs at TUAG / Boston.

Of Lopez’s piece, Pandemonium, 2025, New York Times co-chief art critic wrote: “With its cyclonically swirling image of American flags, newspaper pages and trash projected on the gallery ceiling, our critic writes, the work catches the unmoored psychic metabolism of this Semiquincentennial year.” Read the full review here, aptly titled "The Show the Art World Loves to Hate Gets a Soul.”

To our west in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, we got to see the newest iteration of our Fall 2025 exhibition How do you throw a brick through the window…, co-produced with the team at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. “How do you throw a brick through the window…” takes its title from artist and activist Johanna Hedva, who asks: “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” The question challenges traditional ideas of protest and centers the experiences of disabled individuals navigating systems of power. Revisit the exhibition learn more at JMKAC.org.

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