Michelle Lopez: Shadow of a Doubt
January 15–April 19, 2026
Reception: Thursday, January 15, 6–8pm. TUAG / Medford Aidekman Arts Center
Magical Thinking, of Systems and Beliefs
January 29–April 9, 2026
Reception: Thursday, January 29, 6–8pm. TUAG / Boston SMFA at Tufts
For our spring 2026 season, Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) is pleased to present two exhibitions that offer a critical examination of the limitations of conventional systems of power, while proposing a radical approach to thinking beyond these systems.
Michelle Lopez: Shadow of a Doubt traces sculptor and installation artist Michelle Lopez’s longstanding interest in visibility—and invisibility—which she has explored over the past two decades. Using industrial materials like aluminum, rope, and glass, 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.
Shadow of a Doubt presents Lopez’s drawing practice for the first time in extensive dialogue with new and existing sculptures, which she often describes as lines in space made from rope and metal. Also included in the exhibition are video and sound installations that operate around and above our understanding of objecthood. Altogether, these works underscore her interest in the barely visible, prompting us to consider who in society is rendered invisible by institutions, governments, and other systems of authority.
In lieu of our global state of precarity, Lopez makes it clear that we are—all of us, including the hidden and the unseen—standing squarely in the looming shadows of doubt.
Michelle Lopez: Shadow of a Doubt is organized by TUAG Director Dina Deitsch and supported by Girlfriend Fund, Tufts University AS&E Diversity Fund, and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Shadow of a Doubt is accompanied by Halyard, a yearlong sound and sculptural installation in the adjacent Remis Sculpture Court, on view September 2025–June 2026.
In Magical Thinking, of Systems and Beliefs, artists manuel arturo abreu, DB Amorin, Jonathan González, fields harrington, sidony o’neal, and Africanus Okokon traverse causal, alogical, and ritualistic modes of knowledge formation. Their works across sculpture, new media, sound, print, installation, and video, evoke the oft-denigrating phrase “magical thinking,” signaling to skeptics an impossibility or distortion in the connection between beliefs and reality. Works in the exhibition resist Western frameworks and their historically dominant visual and political regimes, instead offering invitations to see signs, relationships, and links between the material and spiritual worlds in knowledge systems from across the Global South.
These invitations range from the recognition of disappearances within Nollywood film, dream-logics and hacking for anti-colonial technologies, and defiant cellular speculations. Such magical thinking operates as fugitive modes of existence and resistance. A new commission for the exhibition from Jonathan González, suite for a minor meeting, will be realized on February 28, 2026 at the African Meeting House at the Museum of African American History (MAAH) Boston / Nantucket in collaboration with Angela Tate, Chief Curator and Director of Collections. Learn more and register here.
Magical Thinking, of Systems and Beliefs is organized by TUAG Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin and accompanied by a reader, featuring contributions from participating artists joined by scholars and artists Rebecca Schneider, M. NourbeSe Philip, Emilio Rojas, and S*an Henry Smith. Exhibition design is provided by Common Space, a creative studio founded by Jon Santos. Generous funding was provided for the symposium Magical Thinking in November 2023 at MASS MoCA by a Terra Foundation for American Art Convening Grant and the exhibition is supported by Tufts University AS&E Diversity Fund and The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
