Last Friday, Oct. 24, our team visited the exhibition “Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue” at the College of Wooster Art Museum. “Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue” tells a story of agricultural and political resistance and pain through different artists’ perspectives. The works span stories from the U.S. farm crisis of the 1970s to U.S. foreign policy in Central America during the 1980s. The showcase highlights individual communities’ experiences and their interpersonal relationships with agriculture and the land via its exploration of small-scale family farms and indigenous resistance. According to Laura Augusta, the curator, “the exhibition hinges on major conflicts that have scarred the region since the 1960s and how their histories are entwined with that of U.S. agriculture through the corn industry.”
The display draws its name from four conceptual materials — mud, corn, stone and blue — each with material and cultural meanings for the artists involved. Mud (barro/lado), a mixture of earth and water, can be toxic or life-giving. Sometimes destructive, sometimes fertile, it appears in English as a metaphor for both growth and struggle. Corn (maíz), native to the Americas, is a staple cash crop and a cultural foundation in the form of daily meals and creation stories. It is the economic backbone of the Great Plains and, in the Maya origin story, the substance from which the gods made humans. Stone (piedra) suggests weight, endurance and mystery. Stones can protect or harm; they build structures and shape new forms. Finally, blue (azul), a color tied to grief and loss, is also one of the primary colors essential to creating others. Blue appears in the flags of every country represented in the exhibit: El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and the United States.
The gallery features works across diverse media from paintings to textiles and installations. One striking piece is Angel Poyón’s “Su’t/Servilleta tejida: Peinar la tierra con las uñas, hasta desenterrar los hilos de memoria” Translation: “Woven napkin: Comb the earth with your nails until you unearth the threads of memory.”(2020). It includes four woven textiles, traditionally used to wrap tortillas, layered with soft mud and etched with the artist’s fingernail to form corn rows. Poyón reflects on the relationship between farming, food production and memory in his community.
Another standout work, Lorena Molina’s “For the Return” (2023), uses a unique installation of corn stalks from a former corn maze. The stalks are tied and hung upside down by different lengths of rope from the ceiling. Beneath them, a circle of words reads, “Cuando el sueño es la semilla, y la cosecha es el regreso.” Translation: “When the dream is the seed, and the harvest is the return.” Inside that circle lies a pile of gold-wrapped candies labeled “For the Return.” Molina explains that the piece explores the promise and pain of migration on the exhibit’s museum placard: “You hear stories of people getting lost in corn mazes. Sometimes the diaspora can feel like that.” The candy, made from corn syrup, represents a fleeting sweetness, an artificial energy for the long, uncertain journey of return. “I created this site for people that also dream for the return to their homeland like me. My dream for the return is always connected to the land, to the harvest, it is connected to the people, to a version of me that I never got to know.”
Molina’s video performance “Building a Home out of Dirt” (2018) also stood out. Filmed while the artist lived in upstate New York, it shows Molina laboring to build a small structure from loose dirt in a cornfield. The structure never holds, yet she continues to repeat the act despite its futility. She describes the work as a metaphor for the immigrant experience: “My labor is repetitive, intensive, yet futile, as every home I try to build crumbles down. This act is a visual metaphor of my experience as an immigrant trying to build a home in the unwelcoming.”
These three pieces only scratch the surface of the many innovative works featured in the exhibition. “Mud + Corn + Stone + Blue” invites visitors to reflect on the intersections of land, labor and identity and to recognize how deeply connected our shared histories are through the soil beneath our feet. Beyond its beautiful and heartwarming installations, the exhibit tells a forgotten or, in many cases, hidden story of colonialism, illustrating resistance and power in the face of the unknown. The curator’s website shares “Where there are holes, absences, and intractable silences in these histories marked by intertwined traumas—by grief, by mistranslation, by forgetting—artists engage in speculation to imagine the acts of sharing that might have been.”
The exhibition runs till Dec. 5 at the College of Wooster Art Museum. Museum hours are listed below.
