Celebrating the Legacy of Performance Art at SMFA at Tufts

At age eleven, Lu Adami, MFA ‘25, first took free quilting lessons at a local public library in Chicagoland and has continued working in the craft ever since. Although Adami was formally trained in figurative painting as an undergraduate at Brown, quilting is now at the heart of their practice. 

Traditionally, quiltmaking takes place around a circle, and Adami has come to view the inclusive act as representing the things they value most: community, care, and respect. Though they can hang lifeless in a gallery setting, quilts are made to be actively used–to be worn, to comfort, to swaddle, or to be gifted to mark a life passage. Yet, Adami had never previously considered how quilts lend themselves to use as performance objects until they began working closely with their advisor, Professor of the Practice Leslie Rogers, last year. 

“Through her, my practice has transformed into a performance art medium,” Adami said. 

Although SMFA's performance curriculum has shifted over the years, it is still a part of courses taught at SMFA and many faculty, staff, and students heavily incorporate it into their practices. Interestingly, SMFA previously had one of the first and largest performance art areas of any visual arts school in the country–founded by Marilyn Arsem, who taught at the school for 27 years and also founded Mobius Artists Group, a Boston-based artist-run collective in 1975 that continues to push boundaries today. The non-profit is “committed to creating original, experimental work in all media” with many of its dozens of members over the years having been affiliated with SMFA and some continuing to teach or work there. 

In 2013, Mobius gifted its archive to the Tufts University Archive Research Center (TUARC) Tufts University Archive Research Center (TUARC) under the stewardship of SMFA Assistant Director of W. Van Alan Clark, Jr. Library, Darin Murphy and former Mobius board member, and Director of Tufts Archival Research Center at Tufts University Daniel Santarmaria. 

In recent years, TUAG Curator Laurel V. McLaughlin and her colleagues wrestled with the Herculean task of representing the group’s decades of interventions in, an archive and/or a repertoire, which was on view January 29-April 20 this year. 

“Mobius has a rich connection to SMFA and that’s what we are celebrating with this show,” McLaughlin explained. 

When McLaughlin began planning the show’s programming she imagined interventions threading in and out of the exhibition, just the way that the 50-year history of the Mobius Artists Group threads its way through SMFA. 

McLaughlin had previously collaborated with Adami through Students Curate Students in 2024, when they conceived an exhibition of MFA student work at TUAG. McLaughlin said, “I knew from that experience that Lu was very invested in performance as a liminal medium.” SMFA faculty engaged in planning the series, including, Cristóbal Cea, Soulé Déesse, Neda Moridpour, Leslie Rogers, and Jeannie Simms, immediately agreed when Adami expressed interest in more programming engaging performance, leading to the robust eight-week programming series–giving free reign for the project to go in any way that best served student goals. 

“It felt important to give students the autonomy to lead the show’s programming and co-design the syllabus. Lu had a lot of great ideas and really grew and shaped it according to the direction the students wanted to co-create it in,” McLaughlin said.

Adami playfully titled the series, No Vacancy, to allude to the fact that the legacy of performance continues at SMFA even if it's in a more subtle form than in previous eras. Meanwhile, Tufts Career Center with the collaboration of Assistant Director of Career Services Katie Sullivan formalized their work with a two-credit internship opportunity that was also open to any other student who actively participated in the programming each week. 

In January, at the show’s opening, current Mobius artists staged an eight-hour performance in the galleries that streamed out into the school’s atrium. That coincided with the start of Adami’s programming, which was open to all Tufts students and drew a cohort of 15 participants who came from the BFA and MFA programs as well as Tufts’ PhD students in the Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies program. 

With support from the faculty advisory group who helped guide the show, Adami took a deep-dive into readings and screenings–ultimately creating a syllabus for the group which structured a weekly two-hour meeting for the students. Each week introduced a guest faculty or staff member leading a workshop element with topics ranging from motion-capture performance, the history of performance at SMFA, and curating performance work within institutional and artist-led spaces. But students were also encouraged to bring their own work and present it in a supportive group crit environment. 

“In quilting, the quilter makes the top piece themselves and then the community would come together to complete the quilt,” Adami explained. “That’s how I wanted No Vacancy to unfold. The participants said what they wanted or needed and I made the syllabus and our time together responsive and left room for co-creation.” 

Prior to coming to SMFA, Adami taught middle school art at Milton Academy for four years, where they first began to think of themselves as an educator. At SMFA they are considering a future teaching art at the undergraduate level and this internship gave them an encouraging first taste of that experience. 

It also propelled their thesis forward–a performative project in which Adami has quilted together garments made of bra inserts and then photographed themselves and their mother modeling them in a sterile medical examination room at Tufts University Health Services. Next year, they will serve as a Post-Graduate Teaching Fellow at SMFA, gaining even more practical experience in the studio and in the classroom. 

Best of all, the exhibition and the series have given new life to performance at SMFA. “The undergrads are motivated to make an impact. They are reigniting a wider interest in performance and got together and founded a new SMFA Performance Club,” Adami said.

Photography by Alonso Nichols.