Magical Thinking: Reader Launch

Join Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG) and Ulises for a Philadelphia launch of the reader Magical Thinking with artists and contributors Jonathan González and fields harrington alongside TUAG Interim co-Director and Chief Curator, Laurel V. McLaughlin.

The reader engages the oft-denigrating phrase “magical thinking,” signaling to skeptics an impossibility or distortion in the connection between beliefs and reality. Contributors manuel arturo abreu, DB Amorin, Jonathan González, fields harrington, sidony o’neal, M. NourbeSe Philip, Africanus Okokon, Emilio Rojas, Rebecca Schneider, and S*an D. Henry-Smith offer essays, scripts, experimental writing, and photo essays resisting Western frameworks and their historically dominant visual and political regimes, instead offering invitations to see signs, relationships, and links between the material and spiritual worlds in knowledge systems from across the Global South.

The reader is informed by a research initiative including a 2023 symposium at MASS MoCA funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art, and an exhibition at Tufts University Art Galleries entitled Magical Thinking, of Systems and Beliefs, January 29 – April 19, 2026, supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. 

Jonathan González is an artist, choreographer, and writer whose practice spans performance, photography, film, and experimental writing. His work has been presented at the 2026 Whitney Biennial and the 59th Carnegie International, among other museums and performance venues internationally. He is the author of Ways to Move (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025), recipient of a 2025 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a 2024 Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, and serves as Director of the MFA in Dance at Hunter College, CUNY.

fields harrington (b. 1986) is a Brooklyn-based artist working across sculpture, photography, and writing. His practice examines how knowledge, technology, and infrastructures presumed neutral are shaped by ideologies of race, value, and power. Attending to labor, capitalism, and knowledge production, he foregrounds efficiency, timekeeping, resource extraction, and the racialized production of scientific truth, reversing the process by which inequities become imperceptible. He holds a BFA from the University of North Texas and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and studied at the Whitney Independent Study Program. His work has appeared at MoMA PS1 and MIT List Visual Arts Center.

Laurel V. McLaughlin, PhD, is a curator, art historian, writer, and educator, working as the Interim co-Director and Chief Curator at Tufts University Art Galleries. She has shared her scholarly and curatorial work nationally and internationally and published writing in Art Papers, ASAP/J, BOMB Magazine, C Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Sculpture Magazine, Contact Quarterly, Performance Research, women & performance, and te magazine, among others. McLaughlin's work has been supported by Rupert, Acción Cultural Española, the Dutch Consulate of New York, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Terra Foundation, and the Teiger Foundation.