Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue Panel Discussion with Exhibiting Artists
Date:
Saturday, February 28, 2026 | 12:30pm-4:30pm
About the Program:
About the Program:
12:30 – 1:00: Join a tour of the exhibition with Blaffer Director & Chief Curator, Dr. Laura Augusta and Rubin Center Assistant Curator of Practice, Henry Alfonso Schulte
1:00 – 2:15: Reflections on histories of farming & creative practice in the Great Plains. With: The New Farmers Project (Tim Hossler & Paul Stock), Matthew Regier, and Diana Werts. Moderated by Laura Augusta.
2:15 – 3:00: Complimentary lunch & break for informal conversation
3:00 – 4:15: Reflections on contemporary practice in and about Central America. With: Tesora Molina-Garcia, Moe Penders, Angel Poyón, Fernando Poyón. Moderated by Henry Alfonso Schulte. In Spanish & English, with Interpretation.
4:15 – 4:30: Closing observations, followed by informal conversation
About the Artists:
Tesora Molina-Garcia (she/her) is a Salvadoran-American media artist, writer, and educator whose work is here to dismantle the violence of the Global North. A citizen of the Global South and an American Dreamer, Tesora’s research–drawing from various threads in immigration politics, philosophies of madness, and nonwestern esoteric spirituality–aims to explore how structural violence shapes personal and collective experience. A co-founder of Becoming Sticky, a lens-based collective of Central American photographers in the diaspora, Tesora uses a mixed-media approach that combines creative writing, critical theory, and experimental photography to unsettle fixed systems of value and artistic inquiry. Tesora’s work, through novel approaches like insect reiki and games in collective consciousness, is dedicated to the emancipation of bodies, thought, and land. Tesora holds an MFA degree in Photography & Extended Media from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), dual degrees in Photography and Art History from the University of North Texas, and currently serves as Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Futures at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, VA.
New Farmers Project is an interdisciplinary collaborative art/research project that brings together a visual artist, rural sociologist, graphic designer, and a host of independent farmers to tell the story of a new breed of contemporary farmer — the first-generation, small-scale, sustainable farmer. Much like their subjects, the project’s fieldwork methodology is based in open process of collaborative naiveté — essentially working alongside one another, simultaneously influencing and learning from the other. In actively maintaining an open and supportive process, the photographs, interviewing strategies, theoretically informed questions, and pattern making combine with design and conversation to make sense of the hopes and hurdles of new farmers. The collaborative includes Bryan Darby, Tim Hossler, and Paul Stock.
After completing his Ph.D. in sociology from Colorado State University (2009), Paul Stock researched dairy and sheep farmers in New Zealand as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Otago. He currently serves as an Assistant Professor in Sociology and the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Kansas.
As the former in-house art director for renowned editorial photographer Annie Leibovitz, Tim Hossler helped Ms. Leibovitz create her most memorable images, books and exhibitions of the late 90’s through the early 2000’s. Hossler holds a degree in Architecture from Kansas State University (1993) and MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2005). He was the Director of Design at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) and the Art Director of The Wolfsonian-Florida International University in Miami Beach. Hossler currently teaches visual communications and photo culture at the University of Kansas.
Moe Penders is a Salvadoran artist, whose practice is mainly framed in traditional photography. They moved to Houston in 2009 to attend the University of Houston where they received their BFA in Photography and Digital Media and completed their MFA at UC San Diego in 2025. Their work explores the social construction of home, intersectionality of identity and gender expression. Recently Moe has been developing maps which explore translation within cuirnes and migration.
Angel Poyón is an important voice of the experimental Indigenous art community in Central America. Poyón lives and works in Comalapa, Guatemala where he was born. He believes that his work is not limited to creation but to truly connect with the “Rajawal” (spirit) of the object itself, it is in this way that the object intervened becomes a work of art. In Poyón’s cultural community, any object is submitted to a ritual, especially objects that are close to people: the objects have a spirit that needs to be found. When this happens, there is a union between the object and the person who uses it; it is a relation that transcends the matter and is a channel where both parts connect and accompany each other in a lasting relationship. Poyón applies this idea of finding the spirit’s object to conceptual art; he explains that, if the spectator allows himself to enter into the energetic space of the conceptual artwork and find its spirit then he will be able to understand it because he won´t be seeing the piece with his eyes but with his mind.
Fernando Poyón lives and works in Comalapa, Guatemala. His practice can be defined by his desire to communicate social, cultural, historical and political life through experimentation with contemporary media and techniques. Poyón’s work has been included in numerous international exhibitions.
Matthew Regier is an artist and printmaker who grew up on a corn farm in South Central Nebraska. He is a self-taught artist whose formal study is in philosophy and theology. Regier now lives in Matfield Green, Kansas, a town of about 50 people in the tallgrass prairie of the Flint Hills. He and his wife, Tia, are co-founders of The School for Rural Culture and Creativity, a community space that seeks to integrate art, agriculture, and ecology into a vision for a place-based life on the land. More information about “The School” can be found at schoolforruralculture.org. Regier is also a gardener and the minister of the Matfield Community Church. Regier’s prints attend to the prairie as an ecosystem of which the artist is a part. The practice of landscape is not simply a case of observing but of being observed. There is no fixed, objective point to view the world but only an exploration from within. In this way, the images are a mapping not only of the outside world, but of the inner one. For Regier, the artist is an embodied knower whose vision, in the words of philosopher Maurice Merlau-Ponty, “opens upon a texture of being.”
Diana Werts traces her relationship with the land and agriculture to her grandparents, who had a truck farm at the edge of her hometown of Wichita, Kansas. She became immersed in the back-to-the-land movement during her studies in the ‘70s and ‘80s at Emporia State University, where she completed an MA in painting. She returned to Wichita and later to Kansas City to pursue work as an artist, teacher, and musician while raising a family. She and her husband have attended artist residencies in small towns throughout Kansas. Her lifetime interest in gardening lead her to studies of natural ecosystems, which in turn influenced her approach to painting. Regular trips to the prairie in search of images from nature lead her back to the Flint Hills, and she currently lives in Matfield Green, Kansas. This region contains the largest surviving segment of the tallgrass prairie, an ecosystem dating back at least 13,000 years. She has work in private and public collections throughout the region and shows at her studio and at SNW Gallery in Manhattan, Kansas.
This program is made possible by generous support from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston and Independent Curators International.
Location:
Blaffer Art Museum