Adriana Corral: As Long as Life Endures

Adriana Corral is showing As Long as Life Endures at the Blaffer Art Museum, and it's one of those exhibitions that asks you to sit with some heavy things. The title comes from the hymn "Amazing Grace," written by John Newton, a slave trader who later became an abolitionist—a detail that sets the tone for the whole show, which links ecology to human rights.

At the center of the room is a ballistic cube made of transparent acrylic, measuring 4 by 8 by 6 feet—the dimensions of an inverted burial plot. It's a reference to the origins of bulletproof glass, and it anchors the rest of the work. Beside it is a new copper etched panel with "Amazing Grace" hand-drawn by Corral and treated with acid, liver of sulfur, and verdigris patina. There's also the film Terrebonne, which she made with Janaye Brown out of her work with the Pointe-au-Chien tribe after Hurricane Ida.

Across the exhibition, Corral works with glass, oyster shells, copper, and sand, materials that feel rooted in the landscape and the coast. The whole thing circles back to the ideas of protection, vulnerability, resilience, and change—how we hold on to things and how they break.

Corral earned her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2015, she was invited to the 106th session of the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances, and in 2016, she received a Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. As Long as Life Endures runs through December 5 at the Blaffer Art Museum, 4173 Elgin Street, Houston, TX 77004.