Maria Gaspar: We Press Our Hands to the Steel Curtain

Maria Gaspar is showing We Press Our Hands to the Steel Curtain at the Blaffer Art Museum, where it runs through November 21. It's a commission from the museum, curated by Katja Rivera and supported by the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston and the Andy Warhol Foundation.

Gaspar is a Chicago-born, first-generation, interdisciplinary artist whose work moves between installation, sculpture, sound and performance. For two decades, she's focused on the Cook County Correctional Facility in Chicago's Little Village—the neighborhood where she grew up and one of the largest single-site jails in the United States, with an average daily population of around 9,000. She's worked both inside and outside the institution, producing artistic interventions, workshops for detainees, public arts programming and recordings of the jail's architecture and its surroundings.

The exhibition title takes a line from Gloria Anzaldúa's poem and essay The Homeland, Aztlán/El otro México; drawing on Anzaldúa, Gaspar reads walls as structures that shape psychic, social and cultural terrains. Among the works is Clamour, a video running more than 60 hours that documents the demolition of one of the jail's housing blocks.

You can find the show at the Blaffer Art Museum, 120 University of Houston Fine Arts Building, Houston, TX 77204-4018. Admission is free.