STEADY: Michelle Lopez and Ester Partegàs travels to the California College of the Arts' The Wattis Institute in San Francisco, opening January 21 and running through April 15. "The sculptures in STEADY ask us to question how the world is built the way it is, and why. They offer a broader reflection on the balance of power through form, as it extends into the world at large." As part of this show, Lopez will develop a new outdoor public artwork for the CCA campus. This exhibit is traveling from Ballroom Marfa, curated by Daisy Nam and organized at The Wattis Institute by Diego Villalobos.

Michelle Lopez was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts in broad support of her creative practice.

In June 2024, Lopez and a team of 3 videographers and 10 volunteers produced a video shoot at RAIR Philly using a "tornado machine" that harnessed the power of six industrial fans to simulate a wind vortex. A 360-degree camera was mounted in the "eye of the storm." Lopez curated cultural debris and flung it over the vortex, capturing slow-motion footage that will be incorporated into a film to be shown at the Franklin Institute Planetarium in 2025.

Michelle Lopez and Ester Partegàs exhibit new work in STEADY - a meditation on balance, power, and interdependence curated by Daisy Nam and Sarah Melendez.

Impact: Contemporary Artists at the Hermitage Artist Retreat brings together 10 American artists who attended the Hermitage Artist Retreat at some point in their careers. Recent works by Diana Al-Hadid, Sanford Biggers, Chitra Ganesh, Todd Gray, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Michelle Lopez, Ted Riederer, John Sims, Kukuli Velarde, and William Villalongo "address established social, cultural, and philosophical boundaries of creative expression within the visual arts."

Scratching at the Moon presents an intergenerational group of thirteen leading artists in the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community who currently live and work in Los Angeles or have strong ties to the city, including Patty Chang, Young Chung, Yong Soon Min, Vishal Jugdeo, Miljohn Ruperto, Simon Leung, Michelle Lopez, Na Mira, Amanda Ross-Ho, Dean Sameshima, Anna Sew Hoy, Amy Yao, and Bruce Yonemoto.

ProcessLAB: Michelle Lopez, Paper Buck, Sa'Dia Rehman, open November 2023 through March 2024, held space for works in progress by three artists. Lopez used the space to develop different elements of ongoing project PANDEMONIUM, including movement and choreography for a robot, musical composition for the robot and three violists, and the development of a fan-powered dome to test animation projections. Lopez activated the experiments for the public through a multimedia performance in March 2024.

Philadelphia, PA (September 20, 2023)—Moore College of Art &Design (“Moore”) announced the launch of Michelle Lopez: Pandemonium, a collaborative project with the Franklin Institute, made possible by a grant from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage. The project will result in a two-pronged, immersive multimedia installation that will be presented concurrently at The Galleries at Moore and the Fels Planetarium of the FranklinInstitute, connecting the two institutions along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.The exhibition is expected to debut in fall 2025. Read more details here.

Michelle Lopez currently has a solo exhibition at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles in September 2023. See here for the press release.

WHEN UNDER ONE SKY is a public artwork that is in search for unity and commonality. The project attempts to create a series of reparations to the erasures that have happened historically in terms of class, ethnicity, and race, and also to acknowledge these same divisions of difference that are happening nationally and locally with the recent uprisings. The sentiment of protecting neighborhood still pervades despite differences.

The work will be installed on the exterior of Ray Fishtown in 2023 as a permanent public art installation. Read more about the project here

In collaboration with artist Sharon Hayes, artist team of Lopez/Hayes won the public art commission in 2021 to build a public project on the Delaware River waterfront on the the site of the newly developed Penn's Landing Park.

Here is the original winning proposal: "The Forum is a sculpture, a gathering site, a public amenity, a reparation to the landscape and a recognition of the waterfront as a complex site holding meaningful histories. Our work looks beyond the dominant stories of Philadelphia to give a platform to the less-known narratives that are a vital part of our present and future as a city.

The sculpture has two components. A 500ft. long, low wall carved into the landscape that arcs alongside the edge of a designed sidewalk in shape of the 18th century shoreline of the Lenapewihittuck, the name the Lenape gave to the Delaware River. The gesture speaks to the Lenape’s custom of clearing land near riverbeds for settlement and ceremonial assembly. The jagged and rippling boundary orients park visitors to the original geography of the land, and excavates submerged histories along the waterfront.

Sitting inside this gathering site is a constellation of 5 concrete slabs that emerge from the meadow as reimagined ruined fragments from the foundation of Pennsylvania Hall, an 1838 anti-slavery venue near the waterfront that was burned down by a white mob 4 days after its opening. Taking up the Hall’s commitments: freedom, hope, change, righteous collective struggle and justice, the platforms are an invitation for contemporary publics to listen, sing, reflect, dance, testify, witness and be free. They are for park goers, families, friends to sit and hang out and also for organized events like theater, dance, poetry or music. The differently-sized platforms allow for small informal performance and large ticketed events.

Our work invites people to make it their own; it will transform as the city’s transforms; it reaches out to our future selves with a grounded accountability to our rich and diverse pasts. The Forum provides a new foundation that reaches across platforms to see each other anew."

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Read more about the Penn's Landing Park Artwork Commission here

The public project is scheduled to be unveiled in 2025.

In Ballast & Barricades Michelle Lopez employs a formal, fragmented architectural language to critique symbols of nationalism, power, and consumption. In this suspended cityscape reduced to rubble, blockades, borders, flags, and natural elements bleed together while remnants of construction sites and scaffolding create a delicate system of counterweights and counterbalances—all meticulously crafted by hand. For Lopez, this sculptural terrain suggests an ongoing history of bodies and violence in the absence of figuration. It is an urban landscape fabricated out of the material remains of crisis, teetering on the brink of collapse. This full-color catalog documents Lopez’s dizzying, site-specific intervention in the ICA gallery alongside a group of recent sculptures and reproductions of select works from the past two decades. New essays by Aruna D’Souza and ICA curator Alex Klein provide art historical context and unpack the geopolitical resonances within Lopez’s project. These concerns are further explored in an edited conversation between Lopez, artists Paul Pfeiffer and Josh Kline, and curator Joselina Cruz, that ruminates on the complexities of Filipinx identity, postcolonial cultural production, and the rise of authoritarianism.

Read excerpt from the catalogue here
Purchase the catalogue here