Michelle Lopez (born 1970 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Bridgeport, CT, of Filipino Americans, Filipino descent) is an American sculptor and Installation art, installation artist, whose work incorporates divergent industrial materials to critique present day cultural phenomena. She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

Biography

Michelle Lopez received her B.A. in literature and art history in 1992 at Barnard College, and received her M.F.A in 1994 at The School of Visual Arts. Lopez is an Associate Professor of Sculpture in the Fine Arts Program at University of Pennsylvania School of Design and leads the Sculpture Division.

Work

''Boy'' (1999)

Lopez first gained critical attention with her sculpture Boy; a leather covered Honda that made its debut in 2000 as part of MoMA PS1, MoMA / PS1's Greater New York exhibition. Her work examines cultural phenomena related to fanaticism, violence, and questions of identity. Lopez' artistic process looks at post September 11 attacks, 9/11 experience and its abject residue on the sculptural object. Such forlorn themes can be found in "Blue Angels", "The Year We Made Contact", "Strange Fruit", "Banner Year". In a Frieze Art Fair, Frieze review, Morgan Falconer describes Lopez's sculpture as "marvelously poised between being one strange thing and something stranger still."

''Blue Angels'' (2011)

Michael Wilson of Artforum reviewed Blue Angels: "Three roughly folded and heavily crumpled sheets of aluminum lean against the wall and tower above head height, their interiors painted blue or black, their exteriors white or colorlessly reflective. The suggestion that attempts at formal perfection are necessarily doomed to failure is clear, but in their fun-house-mirror distortions, these works direct that argument at not only artistic folly but also the viewer’s own vanities and imperfections. Still, the news isn’t all bad; there’s an insinuation in the aluminum’s shiny. paper- like surfaces of gift wrap, a hint of celebration and renewal.... [T]here is a hint of nose-thumbing at the consistent anality of the Guys, but Lopez's remake is more understated, more extensive, more radical-and a lot more appealing-than that might imply."

''Smoke Clouds'' (2014)

In he
Smoke Clouds
work, Lopez explores themes of disappearance through the shifting image within the material of silver nitrate (mirroring solution) poured onto large-scale architectural glass. Lopez' mirrored smoke clouds reflect the room and the viewer through the original photographic process of silver tintype prints. The cloud image appears and disappears as a "puff of smoke" depending on the environment and the viewers position in the room. Lopez questions the status of the object and the artistic desire to make iconography, while also questioning the viewer's desire to claim it. Her sound and kinetic installation, Halyard, is a further iteration of examining invisible structures of power.

''House of Cards'' and ''Barricade'' (2018)

House of Cards
an installation of an abject collapsing scaffolding system, employs steel rope and street rubble to lift spare minimal lines, as if forms of resistance could actually overcome the well-grooved forms of oppression. Reflecting the current social and political climate, a recent work shown i
Ballast & Barricades
suspends a thousand-pound building fragment by using remnants of cultural signifiers such as scaffolding for falling and climbing ladders as counter weight, creating a state on the verge of collapse.

''Rope Prop Reversal'' (2023)

Writing on Lopez's 2023 solo exhibition
Lasso Reprieve
with Commonwealth and Council LA, critic Vanessa Holyoak writes for Artforum: "Five pieces from the series �
ROPE PROP REVERSAL
” 2023, build on Lopez’s long-term engagement with feminist subversions of Minimalism (visual arts), Minimalism and Abstraction (art), abstraction, deconstructing the movements’ pretensions of monumentality and universality by restoring an unwieldy humility to the industrial materials that she manipulates. The artist’s series responds to Richard Serra’s canonical Minimalist work, ''One Ton Prop (House of Cards)'', 1969, reducing Serra’s cubic sheets of antimonial lead to a sinewy silhouette of their form, and in turn translating the sculpture’s heavy-metal grandiosity into a seemingly weightless geometrical skeleton [...] reframing Serra’s balancing act as one necessarily mediated by the supportive collaboration of material bodies."

Exhibitions

Solo and Group Exhibitions

Lopez has had solo exhibitions at Feature Inc.; Deitch Projects; Fondazione Trussardi; LA >< Art; Simon Preston Gallery; the The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum; Galerie Cristophe Gaillard, Paris; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia; and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles, among others. Lopez has shown in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, MoMA PS1, MoMA/PS 1, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Harvard Carpenter Center for the Arts, Museum of Contemporary Art & Design (Manilla, Philippines), and Artists Space, Artist Space. Recent group exhibitions include 'Process LAB,' The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA (2023); 'Scratching at the Moon,' Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2024); and 'STEADY: Michelle Lopez & Ester Partegàs,' Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas, Marfa, TX (2024).

Public Art

Public Sculptures include projects with the Public Art Fund and Miami Basel Art Public (Bass Museum, Miami, 2013); 'Chandelier,' Podium, Manila, Philippines (2021); and 'The Forum,' with Sharon Hayes (artist), Sharon Hayes at One Percent for Art, Penn's Landing Park, Philadelphia, PA (2025).

Awards

In 2007, Lopez participated in a curatorial project with Grimm/Rosenfeld and wrote an essay on sculpture titled Exit Music (for a Film). She was awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts, NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship Grant in 2009 and was a recipient of the New York Foundation for the Arts Sculpture Fellowship in 2010. In 2019, she earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, Guggenheim fellowship in the category of Fine Arts. In 2023, she earned a Pew Center for Arts & Heritage Exhibition Fellowship for her forthcoming project 'Pandemonium,' opening in 2025 at the Franklin Institute and The Galleries at Moore College of Art and Design, Moore College of Art.

Teaching

Formerly a faculty member at Yale School of Art in the Department of Sculpture, Columbia University, Columbia, New York University, NYU, the School of Visual Arts, and Bard College, Bard in their graduate and undergraduate programs. She has also taught at University of California, Berkeley, UC Berkeley, where she headed the sculpture division and conducted sculptural research on large-scale 3D rapid-prototyping. Lopez now heads the Sculpture Division at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania.

References

External links

'NINA IN POSITION'
By Holland Cotter, New York Times, February 15, 2008.
Michelle Lopez at Simon Preston
by Morgan Falconer, Frieze Magazine, 2008.
The Violent Bear It Away Catalogue
essays by Carissa Rodriguez and Jeffrey Uslip, 2009.
Review of Vertical Neck, NY
by Michael Wilson, Artforum Magazine, 2011.
Review of Vertical Neck Show
by Kathleen Madden, Artforum picks, 2011.

on th
Simon Preston Gallery
website.
Review of work, Howard Hurst, 2011.

Review of work, Blake Gopnik, 2011.

Aldrich Catalogue
by Amy Smith-Stewart, "Angels, Flags, and Bangs", Aldrich Museum of Art Catalogue, 2014.
Michelle Lopez faculty Yale
2012–2017
Michelle Lopez faculty UPenn School of Design
2016–present
Guggenheim Fellowship
Fine Arts, 2019
Ballast & Barricade
ICA Philadelphia, 2019-2020.
Collapse and Equilibrium
by Olivia Gauthier, BOMB Magazine, April 15, 2020.
Ephemeral Building Structures
in conversation with Michael Queenland, Mousse Magazine, 2020.
Review of Ballast & Barricade
by Kari Rittenbach, Frieze, January 15, 2020.
www.michellelopez.com
artist website {{DEFAULTSORT:Lopez, Michelle 1970 births Living people Artists from Brooklyn Barnard College alumni Sculptors from New York (state) 20th-century American women sculptors 21st-century American women sculptors 20th-century American sculptors 21st-century American sculptors