Adriana Corral: As Long as Life Endures

The Blaffer Museum at the University of Houston, in collaboration with the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College (FAC), is honored to present Adriana Corral: As Long as Life Endures.

In new bodies of work, Corral studies the relationship between protection and vulnerability, between resilience and change. Continuing her ongoing exploration of human rights, Corral argues that such fundamental rights are only inscribed into cultural practice in the aftermath of violence and devastation. That tension–between crisis and redemption–underscores the ways in which such rights are not promised or permanent, but always in need of expansion and defense. At the heart of Corral’s project is an investigation of the forces that shape how life—and whose life—is valued. Religion, law, and civic infrastructure each aspire to provide protection, yet their histories reveal persistent failures and exclusions.

The title of the exhibition is inspired by the hymn Amazing Grace. Written by John Newton (1725–1807), a slave trader who converted to Christianity and later became a committed abolitionist, the hymn carries a history of transformation. Building from the song’s history, Corral has developed a body of work that considers the promises and failures of the laws, systems, and faiths that claim to safeguard society’s most vulnerable.

Anchoring the exhibition is a large-scale ballistic sculpture, modeled on dimensions of an inverted burial plot (4 x 8 x 6 feet) and made from bulletproof transparent acrylic. Here, Corral references above-ground mausoleums often found in waterlogged ecologies. The transparent material also recalls the origins of bulletproof glass, developed in the early twentieth century for both medical and military applications. Today the material is widely used to safeguard political leaders, financial assets, and even iconic works of art. Part sanctuary and part memorial, Corral’s sculpture makes visible the contradiction of protection: its capacity to guard a chosen few and its inability to prevent loss.

Accompanying the sculpture is a new copper etched panel featuring the hymn Amazing Grace, hand-drawn by the artist. Treated with acid, liver of sulfur, and verdigris patina, the surface is left to undergo a continuous process of oxidation, an echo of the transformations evoked by the song.

Two new films, created in collaboration with Janaye Brown, and two new sculptures highlight the intersection of environmental collapse and human rights. Corral is interested in the ways that weakened ecologies threaten the survival of communities already marginalized by civic neglect and governmental inaction. The newest video, Title Needed, documents the artist’s engagement with the Point-au-Chien tribe in the wake of Hurricane Ida. Mobilizing material matter such as glass, oyster shells, copper, and sand, Corral connects ecology to human rights issues, foregrounding sites where histories of survival, vulnerability, and resilience converge.

As Long as Life Endures is a bold and ambitious vision that brings specificity to the urgent conversation around the legal protections actively being dismantled in the U.S. today.

The exhibition is co-produced by Blaffer Art Museum & the Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, and is co-curated by Katja Rivera and Dr. Laura Augusta. It is accompanied by a full-color catalogue. Major support for the exhibition comes from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts. Major support for the exhibition and its programming at the Blaffer Art Museum come from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston.

About the Artist

Adriana Corral has dedicated over a decade of her practice to investigating human rights. Much of her work draws inspiration from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—a document that outlines 30 rights and freedoms and has served as the foundation for international human rights laws since World War II—and Article 7 of the International Criminal Court’s Rome Statute, designed to protect marginalized populations. In addition to paying homage to femicides across the Americas, Corral’s past projects include an investigation of the Bracero program in Texas, an agreement in the mid-twentieth century between the US and Mexico that brought laborers from Mexico across the national border to work on farms and railroads. In researching her chosen topics and in lead up to creation of any work, the artist partners with legal scholars as well as community and Indigenous leaders (for example, Ariel Dulitzky, Director of the Human Rights Clinic at the University of Texas Law, and Patty Ferguson Bohnee, Associate Dean and Faculty Director at Arizona State University’s Indian Legal Program).

Corral received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and completed her BFA at the University of Texas at El Paso. She was invited to attend the 106th session of the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary disappearances at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland (2015) and awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2016). Corral attended the McDowell Residency (2014), Künstlerhaus Bethanien Residency in Berlin, Germany (2016), the International Artist-in-Residence at Artpace (2016) in San Antonio, Texas, Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center (2018), New Orleans, Louisiana, and an Artist-in-Residence at Ballroom, Marfa (2024). Corral was an Artist Fellow at Black Cube, A Nomadic Art Museum (2017), an Artist Research Fellow at Archives of American Art and History at the Smithsonian Institution (2018), selected for the Latinx Artist Fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation (2021) and a Planet Texas 2050 Artist Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin (2023-24). Corral is the recipient of the Houston’s Artadia Award (2019), Harpo Foundation (2020) and her exhibitions include Suffering from Realness (MASS MoCA, 2019-2020), Bodies of Knowledge (New Orleans Museum of Art, 2019), Prospect 5: Yesterday we said tomorrow (2020-2022), Eyes of the Skin (Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 2023), Tongues of Fire (Ballroom Marfa, 2023), Unflagging: Futures, (Ballroom Marfa, 2024) and Hidden Histories (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2023-25).