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Moore College of Art & Design presents the two-pronged installation Michelle Lopez: Pandemonium from October 3 to December 6, 2025. Supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Pandemonium will appear concurrently at The Galleries at Moore and the Fels Planetarium at The Franklin Institute, connecting the two institutions along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. A premiere performance and opening reception will take place on Friday, October 3, at 5:30 pm. A series of public programs will be held to celebrate and amplify Michelle Lopez: Pandemonium. Please click here for the full calendar.
Pandemonium propels ideas central to Lopez’s decades-long career—calamity, violence and precarity, along with social and art historical critique—while bringing them into new, expansive forms. Known for her three-dimensional work, Lopez extends her toolkit to include mechatronics, animation, sound and VR film to capture the riotous beauty of a rising tornado in a 360-degree video format. Commissioned by Moore, the video was filmed specifically for the Fels Planetarium and will be shown with 8K projection equipment. Lopez considers the tornado as both a devastating natural phenomenon of unstoppable climate change and as a symbol of the swelling media landscape of disinformation.
Around the corner, The Galleries at Moore will present selected sculptural works by Lopez that demonstrate her deep ability to bring precarious forms to life. Seeming to teeter on collapse or imply imminent changes in atmosphere and perception, these works will be juxtaposed with the Pandemonium film, which will be projected onto a hovering disc that offers an alternate experience of the maelstrom.
Developed by the artist over a ten-year period of ideation, research and production, Pandemonium stems from deep collaborations with curators, engineers, animators, musicians, and production teams.
Performances on October 3 will feature a robot designed in collaboration with a team of graduate students and professor Mark Yim, Asa Whitney Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. To incorporate elements of live performance, Lopez also worked closely with composer Joshua Hey and sound designer and musician Eugene Lew, as well as with choreographer Susannah Yugler. A custom-built simulation machine was filmed on the Tacony grounds of RAIR (Recycled Artist in Residency) Philly as part of the process of creating the tornado.
Pandemonium is curated by Cole Akers, Curator & Associate Director of Special Projects at The Glass House and Erica F. Battle, Curator, BATTLE Projects, in collaboration with Gabrielle Lavin Suzenski, Rochelle F. Levy Director & Chief Curator of The Galleries at Moore.
In addition to the support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Pandemonium has been produced through research and production funding from Guggenheim Fellowship, The University of Pennsylvania University Research Foundation, University of Pennsylvania Undergraduate Research Mentorship Program, The Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design Fine Arts Department, and the Knight Art + Technology Expansion Fellowship.