Opening Reception Adriana Corral & Maria Gaspar
Friday, August 21, 2026
4:00pm—7:00pm
Location:
Blaffer Art Museum
FREE and open to the public
Join us at Blaffer Art Museum for the opening reception of Adriana Corral: As Long As Life Endures and Maria Gaspar: We Press Our Hands to the Steel Curtain.
About 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
Learn more: https://blafferartmuseum.org/adriana-corral/
About Maria Gaspar: We Press Our Hands to the Steel Curtain:
Maria Gaspar’s art, research, and activism engage with jails and prisons—their history, architecture, logic, psychology, and time. For the past two decades, Gaspar has focused on Cook County Correctional Facility, located in the Chicago neighborhood of Little Village, where she grew up. The largest single-site jail in the United States, the facility holds an average daily population of approximately 9,000 people. Working both inside and outside of the institution, Gaspar has produced artistic interventions, workshops for detainees, public arts programming, and has used recording devices to document the jail’s architecture and its surrounding neighborhood. The result is a body of time-based works and sustained engagements that closely study correctional facilities and imagine their undoing.
We Press Our Hands to the Steel Curtain brings together recent work that demonstrates how Gaspar engages with these carceral spaces, deploying time both as a tactic and material. The title is adapted from a line in Gloria Anzaldúa’s poem and essay “The Homeland, Aztlán/El otro México.” In dialogue with Anzaldúa’s writing, Gaspar sees walls as structures which shape psychic, social, and cultural terrains. Pressing hands might evoke healing or resistance: in either case, the gesture is dynamic and temporal.
Learn more: https://blafferartmuseum.org/maria-gaspar/