Photo Courtesy: Pete Molick
Adriana Corral critically examines the nuances of immigration, citizenship, economic trade, labor, public health, and policies in both national and international contexts that are informed by her upbringing on the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas. Her interdisciplinary, research-based practice boldly explores memory, loss, human rights abuses, and unacknowledged histories. Often working across international borders, she mines state and national archives for primary documents and engages historians, anthropologists, journalists, gender scholars, climate scientists, human rights attorneys, and victims’ families for information that materialize in her sculptures, installations and drawings. Corral meticulously uncovers primary documents while also investigating the physical and cultural landscapes of the sites she works with—examining the soil, the built environment, and the community’s collective memory. Her art, often using ash and soil, symbolizes the remnants of destruction – earth and ashes that bear witness to the past.
Corral received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and completed her BFA at the University of Texas at El Paso. She was invited to attend the 106th session of the Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary disappearances at the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland (2015) and awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2016). Corral attended the McDowell Residency (2014), Künstlerhaus Bethanien Residency in Berlin, Germany (2016), the International Artist-in-Residence at Artpace (2016) in San Antonio, Texas, Artist-in-Residence at the Joan Mitchell Center (2018), New Orleans, Louisiana, and an Artist-in-Residence at Ballroom, Marfa (2024). Corral was an Artist Fellow at Black Cube, A Nomadic Art Museum (2017), an Artist Research Fellow at Archives of American Art and History at the Smithsonian Institution (2018), selected for the Latinx Artist Fellowship funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Ford Foundation (2021) and a Planet Texas 2050 Artist Fellow at the University of Texas at Austin (2023-24). Corral is the recipient of the Houston’s Artadia Award (2019), Harpo Foundation (2020) and exhibitions include, Suffering from Realness, MASS MoCA (2019-2020), Bodies of Knowledge, New Orleans Museum of Art (2019), Prospect 5, Yesterday we said tomorrow (2020-2022), Eyes of the Skin, Lehmann Maupin Gallery (2023), Tongues of Fire, Ballroom Marfa (2023), Unflagging: Futures, Ballroom Marfa (2024) and Hidden Histories, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2023-25).