Guggenheim Fellow shares creative process and practice in public lecture

The Museum of Contemporary Art and Design (MCAD) welcomes guests into the creative process and practice of American interdisciplinary sculptor, installation artist, and Guggenheim Fellow Michelle Lopez in a talk scheduled for 11 March. The initiative is part of the MCAD Public Lecture Series, which brings together artists, curators, thinkers and scholars from the Philippines and beyond to offer audiences the opportunity to directly engage with contemporary practices and pressing questions which define the arts today.

During the discussion, Lopez, a conceptualist, builder, and manipulator of materials, will share how she inventively explores cultural phenomena — to stretch the limits of the industrial processes which craft consumerism in its many forms. She is set to walk the attendees through her installations which draw from aesthetic languages of art movements, industrialization, and the built environment to critique the ways dominant narratives, power, and authority shape space.

Tracing her work alongside feminist and queer lineages of abstraction, Lopez makes a case for the formal and political stakes of a present-day sculptural practice. She focuses as much on the volume created around an object as the object itself, making the piece almost disappear as a reflection of our cultural moment. Her notable creations span from Boy (1999) and Blue Angels (2011), to Halyard (2013), House of Cards (2019) and Lasso Reprieve (2023). Her obras have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art PS1 in New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and Los Angeles, Ballroom Marfa in Texas, and MCAD in Manila. Her large-scale Three Rope Prop, open-ended steel ropes which form tenuous squares that appear to lean on one another, was recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Currently, Lopez presents Shadow of Doubts at the Tufts University Galleries in Medford. It displays her 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. Lopez is an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Installation at the University of Pennsylvania.

The talk is set for 3 p.m. at the MCAD Multimedia Room at MCAD, De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde (DLS-CSB) School of Design + Arts Campus, Dominga Street, Malate, Manila. Interested participants may register through tinyurl.com/MCADPublicLectureMichelleLopez.