Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue Curated by Laura Augusta

Told through a constellation of places and temporal back-and-forths, Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue traces stories of the entangled lands of the United States and Central America. The traveling exhibition hinges on major conflicts that have scarred the region since the 1960s and how their histories are entwined with that of U.S. agriculture through the corn industry. These conflicts include armed engagements in Guatemala (1960-1996), El Salvador (1980-1992), and Nicaragua (1979-1990); U.S. interventions in Honduras in the 1980s; and even the Tractorcade (1979) in the U.S. Corn Belt, when farmers drove more than 900 tractors to Washington, D.C. in protest of Cold War agricultural policy that had devastated small family farms across the Plains and Midwest. Across its long timeline, the exhibition centers on the years 1979-1981 to illustrate the overlap between the U.S. farming recession and the worst years of the armed conflicts in Central America, and how they are grounded in the same political and economic decisions around farming practices, ideas of land ownership and stewardship, migrant labor, and agricultural export.

Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue includes artwork from the U.S. Corn Belt and from Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras. For the artists (many of whom have witnessed these events firsthand), it is important to make visible the connections between the natural world, agricultural reform, economic recession, military intervention, civil war, genocide, and mass migrations. These entanglements resist national borders and leap across time to connect disparate experiences when, since much of the artwork made during these crises has disappeared, artists rely on their own familial experience to fill in the gaps. Where there are holes, absences, and intractable silences in these histories marked by intertwined traumas—by grief, by mistranslation, by forgetting—artists engage in speculation to imagine the acts of sharing that might have been.

Rather than chronological or national groupings, works on view are organized in organic relationships with an archival throughline of their complex political and agricultural histories.

To complement the Houston presentation of this exhibition, Lawndale has commissioned new artworks and artist activations. This includes a mural from Dario Bucheli, activations with Zine Fest Houston, and textiles and candies made by Jorge Galván. Lorena Molina will also install an outdoor corn maze in Lawndale’s 4900 Main Street lot (the space adjacent to our galleries and parking), paralleling the experience of immigration and diaspora.

In Houston, Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue is presented at both Blaffer Art Museum (January 17 – March 14, 2026) and Lawndale Art Center (February 27 – May 2, 2026), with additional programming at Aurora Picture Show (February 19, 2026). For more information about visiting and events at each location, please visit blafferartmuseum.org and lawndaleartcenter.org and aurorapictureshow.org

Pictured from left: Oscar René Cornejo, El Mozote, 2005, Mokuhanga on handmade Torinoko Paper. Courtesy of the artist; Angel Poyón, Raspado en azadón, 2016-2022, Industrial paint on metal. Courtesy of the artist; Fernando Poyón, Resonancia, 2016, Digital print on cotton paper. Courtesy of the artist; Lorena Molina, Building a Home out of Dirt, 2018, 7:50 min., video still. Courtesy of the artist.

Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue is a traveling exhibition curated by Laura Augusta, PhD, with Assistant Curator Henry Schulte. It is produced by Independent Curators International (ICI), New York in collaboration with the Stanlee & Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso. Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue is made possible with the generous support of ICI’s Board of Trustees and International Forum. It is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Exhibition graphics by Untitled Agency, Marrakech.

Additional support for the presentation at Lawndale Art & Performance Center has been provided by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, along with the Texas Commission on the Arts.