Pew Fellow Michelle Lopez is a multimedia artist whose sculptural work is immersive and large in scale, filling up gallery spaces with assemblages of construction materials like glass, wood, and steel rope. Her art offers an abstract view on contemporary life and the complex forces that drive it, from industrialization to technology. 

Lopez’s installation Pandemonium, a Center-supported project that opened jointly at Moore College of Art & Design and The Franklin Institute’s Fels Planetarium in Fall of 2025, uses 4D video to transport viewers into the eye of a virtual tornado. Looking up, they’re surrounded by a swirl of cultural debris like articles of clothing, scraps of flags, and newspapers emblazoned with headlines about pivotal political and social moments from the past century. On a metaphorical level as well as a tangible one, Lopez uses the piece to comment on the torrent of modern media, as well as the complexity of both meteorological and man-made disasters. At its opening event, the video was complemented by a live score.

As she prepares for future showings of Pandemonium and her other solo work, Lopez took time to answer questions about the project, its relationship with the forces it critiques, and her creative practice. 

How are you thinking about the rapid advancement of technology and AI as an artist? Is it impacting your practice or how you think about authorship and maintaining your individual artistic voice?

For me, so much of Pandemonium has been about how technology has changed the very nature of how we relate to others, how we get our information, how we process our environment. The project is multi-tiered: I made a film for a planetarium screen that is filled with a riotous tornado, layered with an overwhelming amount of information overhead in the panoramic sky. A part of that impetus was to invoke social and environmental upheaval but also create a sense of how social media distracts with noise. Technology and AI are a huge part of that distraction and misinformation.

Also inside the planetarium, at the center of the storm, I made a sculpture that is part-robot, part-sentinel, part-weathervane that moves in relation to the weight of technology and how it enacts an invisible violence on us, especially AI. I worked with a choreographer and engineers [from University of Pennsylvania, where Lopez is Associate Professor of Fine Arts] to achieve the effect of having the robot’s movements be linked to the exploding sky of information above.

How has your creative practice evolved in the last five or ten years? What has surprised you in your own work?

I’ve always been invested in creating a sculptural experience. What has evolved in my practice in the past ten years is the ways in which I seek that three-dimensional quality, spatially and materially. I never would’ve thought I would make a work in a science planetarium, and yet doing so has connected me to something far more expansive. It has connected me to astronomers, engineers, musicians, and to another way of seeing the world and making art in a collaborative way. I could’ve never found that by working in the studio solo.

What is driving you to create at this moment?

I’ve been inspired by what has been happening globally to our social environment: the sense of collapse to the very basic infrastructures that we assumed were secure. So, in response, I wanted to create this epic beauty that people could relate to and possibly find unity under a collapsing sky.

What do you need most to foster your creative process? What are the biggest barriers?

I need laughter, friendship, meditation, connection, safety, and a sense of agency through materials. I also need failure to get somewhere new. But then, after a good amount of time experiencing soul-crushing bruises, I must pick myself up and try again.

The biggest barrier: fear and listening too much to others to try and please them. Sometimes you don’t understand what you’re doing, and other people don’t understand, and that needs to be ok in the process. Your gut always knows where to go.

Is there anything else you’d like to add?

This project was ten years in the making with curator Cole Akers. It has had so many twists and turns with a global pandemic, social upheaval, and many shutdowns and grant proposal rejections in between. All of that lived experience and history has gone into the work, and I’m so grateful it took that long because it enriched the content of the work. Working with RAIR Philly also strengthened the project. Billy Dufala directed me towards an archive of newspaper clippings from the cultural waste stream, which was a game changer because it all provided content for my tornado machine.

Finally, because the project evolved over an extended research and development phase, we were able to develop a new means in which to exhibit the planetarium film in an innovative format for [smaller gallery] exhibitions: a 20-foot round disc screen with the help of Greenhouse Media.

Do you have any upcoming projects or events you want people to know about?

Pandemonium will be traveling to a museum in New York in the spring of 2026, and in January I have a solo exhibition at Tufts University Art Galleries in Boston. It will be a mini survey of my sculptures and holds keys to everything that led to the Pandemonium work.

I also hope to bring the Pandemonium performance with live violists (composition by Joshua Hey and sound design by Eugene Lew) to other planetariums across the country. Ultimately, I would like viewers to be immersed inside the eye of a tornado storm, and I think the architecture of the dome, the sound, the robot—all combined—offer that bodily experience and more.