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 that commingles their complex political and agricultural histories. As the exhibition travels, Augusta continues the practice of convivencia (shared living) inscribed within her curatorial methodologies by engaging in context-specific acts of collaboration and conversation—including archival research, meetings with artists and community groups, and learning from activists—to better understand each place’s ties to this history.

About the Curator

Laura Augusta, PhD, is the Jane Dale Owen Director & Chief Curator at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston. Her recent exhibitions include Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue (2024-2026), Presentiments (2024), Adán Vallecillo: Tiempo Libre (2024), Proving the Hypothesis of Celestial Flirtation: Christin Apodaca (2023-2024), Jessica Kairé: Levantamiento (2023), Laura Turón: Immersive Abstractions (2023), Here, And the Wind (2023), Sam Reveles: Solastalgia (2022), On Porous Edges & Radical Decay (2021, online), Touch Over Fear (2021, online), Stone’s Throw: Arte de Sanación, Arte de Resistencia (2020), To Weave Blue: Poema al Tejido (2020), and To Look at the Sea is to Become What One Is (2019), among others. Her work has been awarded Fellowships from the Andy Warhol Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Core Critical Studies Program at the MFAH, and Yale University, among others, and her essays have been widely published internationally, in English and Spanish. She has actively published arts criticism in Texas since 2005. From 2016-2020, Laura ran a domestic project space, Yvonne, in her apartment in downtown Guatemala City. Laura’s curatorial/essay projects connect the landscapes of disaster-prone places, thinking specifically about storms and muddiness, shared space, and everyday forms of embodied ongoingness.

About ICI

Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue 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.

The presentation and programs at the Stanlee & Gerald Rubin Center for Visual Arts at The University of Texas at El Paso are supported by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and The Mellon Foundation.