2025 in Review

Gabriel Sosa: I want more celebrations

As part of the Boston Public Art Triennial, SMFA-alumnus Gabriel Sosa (MFA’16) created Ñ Press, a community print studio in East Boston—in collaboration with Maverick Landing Community Services—that transformed zines, posters, pamphlets, and artist books into vessels of connection, activism, and education. Workshops held at the press generated posters, handouts, and billboards—such as I want more celebrations., presented at TUAG / Boston (SMFA at Tufts).

Gabriel Sosa: I want more celebrations, 2025, is presented by Tufts University Art Galleries and is proudly supported by and featured as part of the Boston Public Art Triennial 2025.

Jackson Lot Mural: Libby Paloma

For their Jackson Lot Mural Project, Libby Paloma’s Whether up river, up stream, or up a tree…don’t take the bait. Find the other rainbow fish and swim (2025) conjures a literal interpretation of the familiar expression of speech: “bigger fish to fry.”

Complementing the exhibition How do you throw a brick through the window…, Paloma’s manipulation of soft and campy textiles highlight the artist’s conception of “world softening,” an effort to instill tenderness in an otherwise harsh ableist world, the medical industry, and hyper-productivity within a capitalist society.

A “Conservation Vacation” for Bess

On a sunny morning in May, we wished Bess (aka Bessie), SMFA at Tufts’ beloved rhinoceros sculpture and unofficial mascot, bon voyage as she headed down to a fabrication shop on the East Providence waterfront for conservation work.

What many may not know is that the sculpture, made by SMFA alum Katharine Lane Weems, is made of fiberglass. Under the direction of Paul Amaral, a former boat builder who now specializes in the repair of fiberglass works of art, Bess was cleaned, repaired, and returned to the SMFA at Tufts campus on a flatbed truck later this summer, and repositioned at a welcoming new angle via crane.

Learn more about Bess and the conservation process in this article from Tufts Now.

Tomashi Jackson, Guns and Butter (Nia in The Morehouse Creed), 2022.

We are thrilled to announce the acquisition of work by Fall 2024 exhibiting artist Tomashi Jackson into the Tufts University Permanent Collection, thanks to the generosity of our TUAG Acquisitions Committee (TAC).

Previously on view as part of Tomashi Jackson: Across the Universe at TUAG / Medford, Guns and Butter (Nia in The Morehouse Creed) (2022), features Jackson’s long-time friend and thought-partner Nia K. Evans, founder of the Boston Ujima Project, a unique member-run investment cooperative for communities of color in the Boston area, wearing a knitted cowl made by Jackson against a backdrop of Jackson’s painting The Morehouse Creed, 2022.

The Morehouse Creed is part of Jackson’s 2022 series “The Great Society” in which she explores key moments of history that have shaped our moment—specifically President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s first formal speech about his intentions for the Great Society, given at the University of Michigan in 1963, which led to the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act.

Layered in both its materiality and historical context, this photographic portrait manages to capture a confluence of Jackson’s practice in a single image—a rigorous commitment to racial equity; the use of art as a political tool; a deep research practice; and the primary importance of friendship and community.

Allan Rohan Crite, Madonnas of Transportation Lithographs, 1987

Thanks to the generosity of Allan Rohan Crite’s friend and mentee Susan Thompson, the Tufts University Art Galleries Permanent Collection recently acquired a selection of prints from the artist’s Madonna of the Subway series, presented in full in TUAG / Medford’s Slater Concourse Gallery.

Created in the 1980s, these lithographs originate from Crite’s 1946 painting Madonna of the Subway, featuring a Black Virgin Mary and Christ Child riding Boston’s Orange Line. Crite revisited the subject forty years later in a series of lithographs that depict a Madonna and Child in African dress, placed within shared city life, such as riding the T or waiting at a train station. Combining the sacred and the ordinary, the series reflects Crite’s lifelong dedication to capturing the African American experience in Boston.  

These works were presented alongside the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s Allan Rohan Crite: Urban Glory and Boston Atheneum’s Allan Rohan Crite: Griot of Boston, where visitors to our cities’ cultural institutions able to revel in Crite’s quiet radicalism and appreciation in the divinity of the everyday.

Crystalle Lacouture, SCOREKEEPER #14, Printed by Stone Hill Press, published by Caira Art Editions, 2025.

This year, we were honored to welcome Crystalle Lacouture and Caira Art Editions into the Tufts University Permanent Collection, thanks to the generosity of TUAG Acquisition Committee (TAC) members Lucy Rosenburgh and Mallory Ruymann (MA’17).

Crystalle Lacouture is an artist who works conceptually across disciplines including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. In 2021, Lacouture began her gouache and pencil “MAMA drawings”—pastel colors and shapes overlaid on Champion SCORE KEEPER shooting targets, which are now discontinued. These prints serve as an homage and memorial to those victimized by gun violence. Each drawing has the word “MAMA” hidden in it as both a tribute and a signature.

For the Score Keeper prints, Lacouture shifted these drawings into print form—converting the mass printed shooter target into an etched plate as Caira Art Editions’ inaugural print series. Founded by TAC member Lucy Rosenburgh, Caira Art Editions publishes prints in all media with a growing roster of Boston-area artists and printers. As Rosenburgh writes, “In remaking the Score Keeper as an etching, Lacouture’s targets become precious, a series of identical but equally original artworks.“

This print offers us a form of abstraction that is both transcendent and deeply rooted in the world, and marks the debut of a new and important organization within the Boston art ecosystem.