Tufts University Art Galleries: Library Resources for Past Exhibitions: Home

January 29–April 20, 2025

an archive and/or a repertoire explores the liminal spaces that emerge between archives and ephemeral new media. Featuring the Mobius, Inc. Records —the administrative archive of the Boston-based Mobius Artists Group—this exhibition serves as a local laboratory, delving into materials from Mobius’ experimental performances, new media projects, sound works, dances, and installations. Currently housed in Tufts Archival Research Center (TARC), the Mobius, Inc. Records contains organizational records, photographs, and video documentation from c. 1968 to 2009, chronicling the early work of individual members and the artist-run organization founded by artist Marilyn Arsem, who also founded the Performance Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA), where she taught for over a quarter century.

January 20—April 24, 2022

Art for the Future: Artists Call and Central American Solidarities focuses on the seminal 1980s activist campaign, Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America. Growing out of the friendships, solidarity networks, and political organizing amongst artists and activists such as Daniel Flores y Ascencio, Lucy Lippard, Doug Ashford, Leon Golub, and Coosje van Bruggen, the campaign resulted in exhibitions, performances, poetry readings, film screenings, concerts, and other cultural and educational events in over 27 cities across the United States and Canada. The exhibition highlights Artists Call’s history through a selection of activities and works from the 31 exhibitions and over 1,100 artists who participated in New York City and references Artists Call’s legacy today in new forms of inter-American solidarity networks and visual alliances. This exhibition is the first cross-campus presentation by Tufts University Art Galleries.

January 24 – April 21, 2024

This exhibit surveys the work of artist, critic, and curator Christian Walker (1953–2003). A 1984 graduate of the SMFA, Walker was a path-making gay Black photographer active in Boston, Atlanta, and Seattle, who grappled with the complexities of racTufts University Art Galleries Logoe and sexuality in America to capture his own experiences and communities. While most established histories of Black gay art are rooted in New York and London, Walker’s work sheds light on the often-sidelined cities of Boston and Atlanta, investigating topics such as queer public sex, interracial desire, family archives, HIV/AIDS, censorship, drug use, and Blackness and whiteness.

September 5 – November 12 2023

Elizabeth James-Perry, an enrolled member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag, is a lifelong traditional artist, scientist, and illustrator who engages with Northeastern Woodlands Native cultural expressions in myriad forms, from wampum shell-carving and twined basketry to restorative Native garden design and installation. Double Arrows—invoking the dynamic image of a line with arrow points at both ends—is James-Perry calling forth a visually evocative concept of acknowledging our shared space and human interdependencies with the natural world. This is exemplified in her deep commitment to her materials and carrying on ancestral knowledge and practices from her Aquinnah Wampanoag community, often incorporating dyes from plants she has grown and harvested and wampum shells she has gathered, as well as her training in science and marine biology.  

January 16 – Apr 20, 2025

A survey of the sonic vanguard, Impossible Music brings together sounds, scores, sculptureTufts University Art Galleries Logos, video, and live performances to explore the radical, interdisciplinary potential of conceptual and experimental music. The group exhibition features work across mediums by boundary-defying composers, artists, and collectives including Terry Adkins, Black Quantum Futurism, Nikita Gale, Sarah Hennies, Tom Johnson, Christine Sun Kim, Conlon Nancarrow, Aki Onda, and C. Spencer Yeh.

August 2021 - 2022

This commissioned billboard and installation by designer, artist, and archivist Josh MacPhee welcomes the SMFA at Tufts and surrounding communities into reflection on a year of deep loss and radical change. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare and exacerbated longstanding social, economic, and racial inequities that govern access to health care, housing, information, opportunity, and basic necessities for survival, while at the same time ushering in new forms of protest, solidarity, and mutual aid.

January 24 – April 21, 2024

Through his choreographed video, photography, and sculpture, Kenneth Tam has long explored the myths and performative culture that uphold conventional American expectations of masculinity and identity. Kenneth Tam: Standing in Soft Formation features the aTufts University Art Galleries Logortist’s most recent projects, Silent Spikes (2021) and The Founding of the World (2022). These installations explore historical and present-day tropes of Anglo- American masculinity and their impact on Asian American identities; first through the invisible migrant labor that fueled the nineteenth-century dream of the American West, and then again through the fraught rituals of the college fraternity. Together the pieces offer a critical inquiry into the ways in which history embeds itself deeply in our bodies through the organizations we build physically and socially.

January 24 - April 23, 2023

For re:imagining collections, four artists, Ali Cherri, Nicole Cherubini, NIC Kay, and SANGREE, were invited respond to Meso-American and Mediterranean antiquities in the Tufts University Permanent Collection. Each artist developed new artistic reactions inspired by the collection, considering the ethical and moral implications of relevant museological frameworks.

August 30 - October 23, 2022

Puerto Rican-born, Oakland-based conceptual interdisciplinary artist Sofía Córdova works with performance, music, video, photography, sculpture and installation. Presenting an extensive body of work that highlights Cordova’s engagements with climate capitalism and its entanglement with colonial erasure, this solo exhibition includes a newly commissioned installation GUILLOTINÆ WannaCry Act Green: Sauvage, Savage, Salvaje and video works from Córdova’s series SIN AGUA (presented together for the first time) and dawn_chorus.

August 30—December 5, 2021

Staying with the Trouble is a group exhibition that proposes strategies and coping mechanisms for navigating the current political and socio economic climate, which seems to be simultaneously slipping backward into the archaic and forward into the apocalyptic.

August 30 - December 11, 2022

The Sun Rises in the West and Sets in the East, guest curated by curator and writer Sara Raza, explores social and cultural seismic shifts and how the traditional culture and classification of science, philosophy, biology, and economics have collapsed in contemporary society. The exhibition features 11 contemporary artists who challenge geopolitical narratives, systems, and power dynamics, including new and recent works by Lida Abdul, Kader Attia, Yael Bartana, Asli Çavuşoğlu, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Ali Cherri, Anton Ginzburg, Emily Jacir, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Nyugen E. Smith, and Nari Ward.

July 30 – December 8, 2024

Deeply committed to social justice, Cambridge-based artist Tomashi Jackson (b. Houston, TX, 1980) creTufts University Art Galleries Logoates vibrant prints, paintings, videos, textiles, and sculptures that powerfully explore systemic inequities found throughout U.S. history. Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe is the first exhibition to present the evolution of Jackson’s work over the past nine years in which she fuses deep historical research with artistic strategies of color and layering to illuminate underrecognized patterns of activism, resistance, oppression, and societal advances.

August 13 – November 10, 2024

Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) presents Ulises: Assembly, a residency and exhibition engaging the labor of bookworkers from the Philadelphia-based collective Ulises. Founded in 2016 and run by members Nerissa Cooney, Lauren Downing, Kayla Romberger, Gee Wesley, and Ricky Yanas, the bookshop and project space explores the relationships between publics and publications through projects, exhibitions, and residencies asking: “what do you do?” as a means of delving into the printed matters of art publishing today. This project aims to render visible labor, friendships, conviviality, and collectivity of bookworkers as a tribute to their chaotic communality. Ulises: Assembly will be presented at TUAG’s Grossman & Anderson Galleries at SMFA at Tufts campus at 230 Fenway, Boston from August 13–November 10, 2024 and is the first institutional residency and solo exhibition of the collective.

September 5 – December 10, 2023

Véxoa: We Know is a survey exhibition of living Indigenous artist of Brazil developed by curator and educator Naine Terena (member of the Terena Indigenous people of the Brazilian State of Mato Grosso do Sul), that argues for new aesthetic criteria to reflect the contributions of Indigenous nations in today’s Brazil. Informed by the role of art as a tool for activism, the exhibition presents the work of 22 artists and collectives from regions throughout Brazil, and ranges from painting, drawing, and sculpture to video, performance, and sound installation. First presented at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2020, Véxoa: We Know will have its only North American venue at Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG), in Medford, Massachusetts, whose vicinity includes one of the largest diasporic Brazilian communities in the United States.