Jackson Lot Mural: Rachel Perry

For TUAG’s 5th iteration of the Jackson Lot Mural, SMFA alumna Rachel Perry expands and enlarges her Unfolded series—a group of multi-media works based on open, painted cardboard boxes—from COVID-19 testing boxes to makeup containers to food packaging as a means of self-archiving her own consumer existence. The title of the work simply states the contents of each unfolded package, now painted bright “colors of consumerism,” as the artist describes her palette, and lined up, side by side, as if marching along the parking lot wall. “Cardboard boxes are often reused: for protest signs, for packing and moving our earthly possessions, for creating shelter for the unhoused,” Perry notes. “For years I have been unfolding and saving boxes, those I bring inside and others that arrive by delivery services. I’ve used them as inspiration and material in my work, making sculptures, drawings, photographs, textiles, and even videos out of them, always thinking about converting something rapidly used up into a meditation on the slowness of art making. The work is an antidote to the flattened experience of digital life. The box’s strangeness has always been there, hidden; here you can fold it in your mind.”

Kleenex, Tea, Chocolate, Covid Test, Cold Compress, Hairbrush and Two Crackers by Rachel Perry is on view through Summer 2027, and is presented as part of the 150th anniversary of the founding of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and its yearlong celebration of arts, pedagogy, and alumni in exhibitions and installations organized by Tufts University Art Galleries. This mural is generously supported by Lisa and Stephen Lebovitz. Special thanks to Laura Beth Reese, Studio Operations Manager, SMFA at Tufts, for production support.

Image: Rachel Perry, Mural installation of Kleenex, Tea, Chocolate, Covid Test, Cold Compress, Hairbrush and Two Crackers, 2026. Photo by Cat Lent.