Michelle Lopez Holds the Line Between Control and Collapse

​Sculptures and drawings by the Philadelphia-based artist Michelle Lopez often look weary, as if they’re convalescing after a crash. At times, they evoke the aftermath of bombings. Folded and crumpled sheets of metal from her Blue Angels series (2011–26), for example, reference the US Navy’s flight demonstration squad and, critiquing these hawkish and symbolic cheerleaders, suggest objects salvaged from somber scenes. Think damaged airplane wings or artifacts pulled from the wreckage after 9/11. Nearly a dozen sculptures and roughly twice as many drawings by Lopez—who witnessed the World Trade Center attacks while living in Brooklyn—is on view through mid-April at the Tufts University Art Galleries.

The exhibition unfolds in four parts. The main show upstairs, “Shadow of a Doubt,” highlights the centrality of drawing in Lopez’s practice. Downstairs, a complementary exhibition pairs her work with objects she selected from the university’s collection. An installation occupies the sculpture court, and a separate performance took place on March 28. Together these components create a multifaceted investigation of Lopez’s work.

The works require some interpretation. In many of them, ropes or rope-like hair are central protagonists. Halyard (2014) is featured in the sculpture court. It’s a cross between a ship’s mast and a flagpole—a floor-to-ceiling column without sail or banner. A motor, mimicking the wind, agitates the rope running along the column, causing it to fidget and jitter. In the upstairs gallery, Continuous Line (2019) is a spindly, matte-black, mostly steel monument in which a paradoxically curved yet stiff rope and a section of chain-link fencing prop up a flagpole. Clinging to the pole, a lead flag bunches up as wet fabric might. Across the gallery, the glass sculpture Smoke Cloud VIII (2016) reflects Continuous Line, its tilted posture captured among the sooty stains Lopez produced by pouring silver nitrate on the glass. Doubled and destabilized, the reflection appears personified, like a dancer checking the mirror mid-rehearsal. A related ink drawing exhibited nearby, Continuous Line Study (2021), looks like a tangled framework pulled in different directions with a flagpole at the center.

In an interview for a booklet accompanying the show, Lopez explained to Dina Deitsch, director and chief curator of the Tufts galleries, that after reading about the history of lynching, she hoped to “renegotiate rope by reversing its function.” A modest tool, rope has been an instrument of racial terror, maritime trade, slavery, and colonialism. Prefiguring Lopez’s examinations of rope, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the artist Jackie Winsor made seemingly gravity-defying and role-reversing architectural artworks from heavy rope covered in resin. One stood up straight and formed an arch. Lopez and Winsor overlapped at the School of Visual Arts, where both taught and Lopez earned an MFA. By contrast, the younger artist’s ropes are more wonky, nimble, and politically suggestive. Ropes bind, lift, pull, restrain, and delineate. In Lopez’s hands, they carry threat, memory, and possibility.

Lopez fashioned Single Line (2023), Safety Dream (2023), and RopeHinge (2025) from many yards of steel coated with nylon flocking to look like rope with a velvety surface. (The third sculpture was co-commissioned by Tufts.) They do not coil neatly or stretch taut between points. Like massively enlarged doodles or trick rope, they have a snake-like quality and a windswept wiggliness, even though they are actually stiff and still. The two L-shaped lengths in RopeHinge bend like legs at the knee. They’re large and suggest infrastructure. One you can walk under. Yet they make the architecture in the room—its doorways, windows, and railing on the way downstairs—look rigid to the point of being uptight. Even though they are sculptures, they feel in some ways like drawings, like fast figure sketches in ink. One could be a person (thin as a rake, skinny as a rope or rail) sitting down on the floor with their legs extended in front of them and their arms up overhead. The other is bent over at the waist, flat back, arms out against their ears, pushing against the wall to try to get a good stretch. The firm rope in RopeHinge thus becomes spinal, the central and shared element of vertebrate architecture. 

In the corners of the same room, flanking her two stripped-down skeletons, Lopez painted two “Blue Angels” on the walls. These tree-trunk-like shapes could almost read as shadows cast by the adjacent ropes. In light of her critique of Blue Angels as grossly celebratory war machines, the blue shadows can be read as malevolent, embodiments of a capacity for violence that’s always threatening, lurking in the corner, trailing just behind every hint of a human form. Negotiating rope’s function, Lopez seems also to recognize that you can’t completely divorce rope from its history or violent connotations. Rope is a cruel reminder.

It also resembles hair. Exhibited on the way down into the lower gallery and within that space, Ghost Tresses—a group of drawings and sculptures Lopez created between 2009 and 2023—are in dialogue with figurative sculptures such as Takashi Murakami’s iconic anime-influenced couple Hiropon (1997) and My Lonesome Cowboy (1998). Hiropon holds a jump rope made from her breast milk while My Lonesome Cowboy poses with a lasso of semen, their elaborate hairstyles as exaggerated as their anatomy. Murakami’s figures turned bodies into spectacle, amplifying them as caricatures and commodities. Lopez moves in the opposite direction. She renders hair scraggly, matted, and disembodied, resisting race-based fetishization. Where Murakami’s duo performs absurd excess, Lopez’s bronze moppy wigs slump unheroically, cast-off locks on the edge of pedestals or plopped on the floor.

The focus in these exhibitions on the synergies between drawing and sculpture is mostly successful. The sculptures have a simplicity, restraint, and emphasis on linework often associated with drawing. Some of the Blue Angels drawings on paper feel underdeveloped, though—important as notations for the artist, perhaps, but secondary for audiences. Frankly, Lopez is strongest in two dimensions when she lets her sculptural instincts take charge—as shown downstairs in works from 2009 that had her painting hair in gouache and watercolor on leather, the substrate elevating and animating the mark-making, sometimes to haunting effect, white pigment collecting in the grain of the leather, the rendering of the hair and the leather becoming one, like a new and wild animal.

Further, in the galleries downstairs, the inclusion of works from the university’s collection reads as an afterthought, no matter how resonant individual items are on their own terms. Untitled A, an excellent 1973 work in watercolor and graphite by Juan Genovés, for instance, portrays three figures, presumably dissidents in fascist Spain, their hands tied behind their backs, struggling to get free. The image is moving but registers differently than much of what Lopez does best. Her works already prompt difficult and pertinent conversations without juxtaposition. C3PO (2008/2022), a bronze on a plinth in the same room, is a nerdy George Lucas droid mask reimagined as a spent condom. The ultimate product placement or movie superfan merch, it trolls President Ronald Reagan’s 1980s “Strategic Defense Initiative,” which was nicknamed “Star Wars” and intended to shield the US from Russian nuclear missiles. This joke is a harsh one. The sculpture seems to say that no matter what fantasy of pleasure or protection someone entertains, they will never be entirely safe.

Despite its extensive and complex content, the Tufts exhibitions present Lopez at her most restrained and minimal. Pandemonium (2025), included in the current Whitney Biennial, reveals more about her range and relevance. A planetarium-style circular screen hangs from the ceiling, playing a film partly animated but largely shot at a dump, filming above a fan-powered apparatus the artist devised to blow items up into the air. In the piece, a brick dome breaks apart, unleashing an accelerating swirl of newspapers, clothing, and American flags—a beautiful and alarming profusion of trash. Phrases like “inside look at terror” and “send help” can be made out amid the debris. Pandemonium abandons much of the control evident at Tufts. If the works in Boston hold collapse in suspension, hint at it, or limn its aftermath, this one lets it happen.

Yet clearly the Tufts exhibitions have their unadulterated pleasures. Around the corner from RopeHinge, Safety Dream is a two-tiered tower of tangled zesty orange rectangles, like the frame of a club chair for a stylish and adventurous giant. It looks wobbly, but, as Lopez loves contradictions, it’s firm. Walking around it, the shapes change, cinematically, as stills might from an animation of someone drawing a stack of three-dimensional boxes, but refusing, delightfully, to adhere to straight lines. And, maybe that’s the point here. What is lovely and worthwhile is not always wholly crisp. Safety Dream demonstrates a spirit that runs throughout Lopez’s work. What looks provisional, trashy, or alarmingly unsafe may nevertheless remain upright or continue all the same.

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“Michelle Lopez: Shadow of a Doubt” is on view through April 19, 2026, at Tufts University Art Galleries, 40 Talbot Avenue, Medford, MA.