Michelle Lopez has been promoted to the rank of associate professor, with tenure, in the Department of Fine Arts, effective July 1, 2022.
Michelle Lopez is an interdisciplinary sculptor and installation artist, who arrived at Penn in 2016. She explores cultural phenomena, examining political and social structures by inverting cultural tropes through the process of building and exploiting industrial materials. She inventively riffs off of our relationship to “products” by combining forms of capitalism with contradictory materials. Lopez was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019, followed in 2021 by a Hermitage Fellowship in Fine Arts and recently had a solo show at the ICA from September 2019 - May 2020. She is winning highly competitive public art commissions in Manila, Paris, and Philadelphia. Her work is being exhibited in significant venues, including Simon Preston in New York, and international group shows in Istanbul, Manila, Paris and Reykjavik, among many other cities. Michelle garnered a University Research Grant from Penn and was made a fellow with the Penn Humanities + Urbanism + Design Initiative in 2017. She has led the reorganization of the Franklin Annex studio and its fabrication spaces to increase the sculpture-making capacity in our school.