The Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue exhibition in Houston connects art with the United States’ agricultural history and the conflicts in Central America. Only at the Blaffer Art Museum.

The new season of exhibitions arrives at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston; among the new installations is “Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue” (Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue), which traces the interconnected histories of the lands of the United States and Central America.

This traveling exhibition focuses on the major conflicts that have marked the region since the 1960s and on how their histories are intertwined with that of American agriculture through the corn industry.

These conflicts include armed clashes in Guatemala (1960-1996), El Salvador (1980-1992) and Nicaragua (1979-1990); the U.S. interventions in Honduras in the 1980s; and even the Tractor March (1979) in the U.S. Corn Belt, when farmers drove more than 900 tractors to Washington, D.C. to protest Cold War agricultural policy that had devastated small family farms in the Great Plains and the Midwest.

Over its extended timeline, the exhibition focuses on the years 1979-1981 to illustrate the coincidence between the U.S. agricultural recession and the worst years of armed conflicts in Central America, and how both are rooted in the same political and economic decisions around farming practices, ideas of land ownership and management, migrant labor, and the export of agricultural products.

“Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue” includes artworks from the United States’ 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, agrarian reform, the economic recession, military intervention, civil war, genocide, and mass migrations.

Rather than chronological or national groupings, the works on display are organized into organic relationships with an archival throughline that interweaves their complex political and agricultural histories.

As the touring exhibition progresses, Laura Augusta (curator) continues the practice of convivencia embedded in her curatorial methodologies, participating in collaboration and dialogue-specific acts for each context, including archival research, meetings with artists and community groups, and learning from activists, to better understand the links of each place to this history.

The Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue exhibition is presented at the Blaffer Art Museum from January 17 to March 14, 2026, and at the Lawndale Art Center from February 27 to May 2, 2026. For more information, visit blafferartmuseum.org and

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Details

What: “Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue”

When: January 17 to March 14, 2026

Where: Blaffer Art Museum

Admission: Free

More information: blafferartmuseum.org