This Friday and Saturday, we’re thrilled to present two exciting programs highlighting the work and practice of TUAG / Medford exhibiting artist Michelle Lopez.

As folks around the country gear up for a national day of protest on Saturday, March 28, TUAG will present two events that explore instability, visibility, and resistance with Lopez, whose practice has long engaged with protest movements and moments of rupture, recasting minimalist and post-minimalist forms into critiques of capitalism, chauvinism, and other narratives of hegemony.

On Friday, March 27th at 12pm, Lopez will present an artist talk at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts (SMFA) as part of the graduate program’s Visiting Artist Lecture series.

For the Saturday, March 28 at 10am performance, Lopez and collaborator sound artist Austin Fisher pull on the visual language of a walking campus tour, a funeral procession, and a silent protest of collective marching and handmade signs—from Black Lives Matter to anti-ICE preventions—as a form of choreography to create a sculptural space of contemplation and visibility for those unable to participate and made invisible by the state.

We invite you to join us and further enrich your experience of the groundbreaking solo exhibition Michelle Lopez: Shadow of a Doubt.

RSVP and learn more here.

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. Or in the case of a campus belltower, echoes of Kent State and other acts of real or virtual violence set upon on campus freedoms.

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. The performance challenged the skewed historical narrative of American freedom, at a moment of heightened xenophobia, racism, and division. Lopez uses the clanging beat of the ringing bell to structure a somber march that slowly but powerfully rings the reality of the current American climate.

Reconsidered for Tufts University and its belltower in Goddard Chapel in 2026, 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.