26–27 BLAFFER ART MUSEUM EXHIBITIONS

Maria Gaspar: We Press Our Hands to the Steel Curtain
August 22, 2026-November 21, 2026

Opening Celebration, August 24, 2026 from 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM

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. 

This exhibition is curated by Katja Rivera. Major support for the exhibition and its programming at the Blaffer Art Museum comes from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston. 

Image credit: Maria Gaspar, Disappearance Jail (California), 2022.

Adriana Corral: As Long As Life Endures
August 22, 2026-December 5, 2026

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. 

Major support for the exhibition and its programming at the Blaffer Art Museum comes from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston. 

Image credit: Still from Terrebonne, 2025. Courtesy the artist. 

Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck
January 09, 2027-March 20, 2026

Surveying photographic, video, and audio works, participatory and multi-media installations, early graphic pieces, and textual interventions, Susan Silton: Diving into the Wreck is a major career retrospective exhibition, making visible a vital figure in West Coast genealogies of art and design. Taking its title from Adrienne Rich’s 1973 poem Diving into the Wreck, the exhibition reveals Silton’s layered practice, testing the possibilities and limits of text, vision, perception, and participation in social and political becoming. Accompanied by a catalogue with newly commissioned art historical essays alongside new and reprinted literary texts, the exhibition offers a new vision of Silton’s practice and asks visitors to imagine alternative collective futures, from the wreckages of the past, both personal and communal. Commissioned and produced by the Blaffer Art Museum and curated by Art Historian Dr. Andy Campbell (University of Southern California), the exhibition will also be shown at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery. 

Major support for the exhibition and its programming at the Blaffer Art Museum comes from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston. 

Image credit: Susan Silton. In everything there is the trace, Installation with collective public performance, 2013. Photo courtesy of Alex Brown. 

49^th Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition

 Opening April 2, 2027
April 2, 2027 - April 18, 2027

Each spring the Blaffer Art Museum and the University of Houston School of Art proudly present the work of the Master of Fine Arts degree candidates from the school’s five studio programs: Graphic Design, Interdisciplinary Practices and Emerging Forms, Painting, Photography/Digital Media, and Sculpture. The exhibition showcases bodies of work produced in a studio intensive environment over the three-year degree program. 

2027 School of Art Student Exhibition  

Opening May 1, 2027
May 1, 2027 - May 16, 2027

Every spring this popular exhibition introduces the University of Houston campus and Houston audiences to the work of School of Art undergraduate seniors and first- and second-year graduate students. The show features works selected by School of Art faculty in consultation with student artists. More than 100 UH artists will present works during this exhibition—which has long served as a way to introduce rising artists to local patrons and provides students with the experience of presenting works in a professional museum. 

Tiffany Chung Indelible Traces, curated by Dr. Orianna Cacchione

June 26, 2027-October 2, 2027

Tiffany Chung: indelible traces is the first comprehensive museum survey of Houston-based artist Tiffany Chung. Including more than 70 artworks that highlight Chung’s expansive 25-year career, the exhibition engages with histories that have too often been overlooked or intentionally ignored. Through her materially meticulous and deeply research-driven work, Chung excavates complex and often hidden entanglements—of history, politics, geography, economy, and climate. Best known for her intricately drawn and embroidered maps, a major part of Chung’s work interrogates the systemic causes of migration. Beyond charting human movements, her work unravels and reweaves the entwined relationships between nature and human societies, studying the migrations of flora and fauna—particularly spices, along with the cross-border trajectories of foods, cultures, and languages. She often mines the histories of single sites to reveal systems of power and cycles of transformation—natural or human-made, resilient or destructive—across stretches of geological and generational time. Chung employs extensive archival research to fill in the gaps that official histories and popular discourses overlook or intentionally disremember. She merges individual voices and collective memories with landscapes as active sites of remembrance through her rigorous research and qualitative analysis to challenge the power of mapping and grand historical narratives. Ultimately, her artworks question not only how history is told but also who tells that history, who belongs within it, and who and what are excluded. The exhibition was produced by the AD&A Museum at the University of California Santa Barbara and curated by Dr. Orianne Cacchione, Deputy Director at the University of Richmond Museums. 

Major support for the exhibition and its programming at the Blaffer Art Museum comes from the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston. 

Image credit: Detail of Tiffany Chung, Global Spice Trade: routes from ancient time to the age of exploration/exploitation, 2024–2025, embroidery on fabric. Courtesy of the artist and Kiang Malingue Gallery, Hong Kong | New York. Photograph by Andrea Rossetti.