Barbara Gallucci
Tufts University was deeply saddened by the loss of Barbara Gallucci, long-time and beloved SMFA at Tufts faculty member from 1998-2019, who passed away in April 2025.
Barbara Gallucci, long-time and beloved SMFA at Tufts faculty member from 1998-2019, was a notable New York and Boston-based professor, sculptor, and photographer whose work explored and critiqued histories of artistic modernism and ranged from photography to large-scale installation. She passed on April 7, 2025, at age 71, in Illinois, surrounded by family and loved ones after an extended illness.
Before earning her MFA at Yale University in 1987, Barbara was a pioneer as one of the first women to be hired at George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic where she worked on such films as Star Wars and the Gooneys. She left film to ultimately become a beloved and influential faculty member at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (now SMFA at Tufts) for over twenty years, where students and colleagues alike were fascinated by her early film career and deeply influenced by her smart and deeply felt engagement with art. She was a kind and generous mentor and friend to many in the New York artworld and the SMFA community, where she supported the careers of many young artists.
She brought her pioneering vision, imagination, and generous spirit to her early photographic work, which documented the prefab housing movement of the 1950s in America, including Levittown A-Frames. Architecture also inspired her sculptural and installation pieces, where she recreated the work of iconic modernists using humble materials such as carpet and plywood. She was an active artist until her death, when she was developing photo/sculpture hybrids; large scale photos printed on canvas of Frank LLoyd Wright's Fallingwater with the canvas photos used as sculptural elements. These she combined with construction materials to create staged environments, speaking of the relationship between nature and the built world.
She participated in many important exhibitions including at the Colby Museum of Art, the DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA, Carrol and Sons Gallery, Boston; Bakalar Gallery Mass College of Art, Boston; Greene St Gallery, Boston; Kayafas Gallery, Boston; Derek Eller Gallery, NY; Lauren Wittels Gallery, NY; Site Santa Fe, in NM; Galerie Les Filles Du Calvaire in Paris; Frac Credac in Paris; Frac Le Quartier in Brittany; Frac Villa Tamaris in Provence; Lothringer 13 in Munich, Germany; Tri Gallery, Los Angeles; McKinney Ave Contemporary, Dallas. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times, LA Times, Artforum, Boston Globe, Boston Pheonix, Village Voice. Her work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Tufts University Art Galleries, and Colby College Museum of Art. She was a recipient of the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant, the Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and the International Art Critics Award (IACA); for best solo show in Boston 2004.