Impossible Music: January 16–April 20, 2025
TUAG / Medford Aidekman Arts Center
40 Talbot Avenue, Medford, Massachusetts
an archive and/or a repertoire: January 29–April 20, 2025
TUAG / Boston SMFA at Tufts
230 Fenway, Boston, Massachusetts
For the winter/spring 2025 season, Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) are pleased to present two exhibitions examining the dynamic relationship between time-based practice, performance, and their radical capacity for transformation.
Impossible Music, a survey of the sonic vanguard that brings together sculptures, sounds, scores, video, and live performances to explore the radical, interdisciplinary potential of conceptual and experimental music, is on view now at TUAG / Medford (Aidekman Arts Center) through April 20, 2025. From the banned to the bombastic, this exhibition highlights the work of visionary artists who pushed music forward, defying norms and piloting new forms of expression.
Impossible Music 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. Shown together, the works in the exhibition address the complexity of music and moments in human history that led to the creation of new sounds, including the sound of resistance.
First organized by ICA Pittsburgh (formerly Miller ICA), Impossible Music is co-curated by Forge Project Executive Director and curator Candice Hopkins and composer, performer, installation artist, and 2023 MacArthur Fellow Raven Chacon in their first curatorial collaboration and organized at TUAG by Dina Deitsch.
Opening January 29 at TUAG / Boston (SMFA at Tufts), 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 poses a challenge to the legacy of the material archive while also activating the collective imaginary of the repertoire—gestures, spoken word, movement, dance, sounds—that might otherwise be lost, erased, or forgotten.
an archive and/or a repertoire serves as a local laboratory, delving into archival materials from Boston-based Mobius Artists Group’s experimental performances, new media projects, sound works, dances, and installations alongside embodied contributions from Mobius Artists Group members, new commissions by Lani Asunción and Forbes Graham, as well as work by artists Aki Sasamoto and Takahiro Yamamoto.
an archive and/or a repertoire is curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, with assistance from TUAG Graduate Research Fellow Wenxuan Xue (Tufts University PhD Candidate in Theatre and Performance Studies) in dialogue with Mobius founder Marilyn Arsem, who also founded the Performance Area at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (SMFA).
Generous support for TUAG programming is provided by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Tufts AS&E Diversity Fund.
