Image: Interacting with KaleidescopElote (2026). Rendering by Luis Bolaños. Image courtesy of Amor Muñoz Studio
The Utah Museum of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City presents ‘salt 18: Amor Muñoz’, the latest edition of its solo exhibition series, from October 24, 2026, through June 6, 2027. The Mexico City-based artist has built a new immersive installation, ‘KaleidescopElote’, around a single subject: corn.
The title draws on the word for corn, elote in Spanish and elotl in Nahuatl. Muñoz uses oversized resin kernels as modular building blocks for a central sculpture that, according to the museum, can be read as an observatory, a lighthouse, a seed bank or an oracle. Visitors who step inside find an interactive digital kaleidoscope of stars and seeds, while an augmented reality soundscape shifts in response to how people move through the gallery.
The museum presents the crop as far more than a staple. The exhibition treats corn as a vessel of memory and of exchange between cultures, and as a form of knowledge handed from one generation to the next. By setting new technologies against much older systems of understanding, the installation considers the long-standing ties linking farming, building and the observation of the sky, and more broadly the relationship between people, nature and the cosmos.
A free public celebration on October 23 offers the chance to meet the artist, with music by DJ Drew and refreshments.
Muñoz is self-taught and works across textiles, sculpture, sound, installation and performance. For more than fifteen years she has paired experimental electronics with craft techniques, giving the hard logic of engineering a soft, handmade quality. She has held residencies at La Becque in Switzerland, Bauhaus Dessau in Germany and Google Arts & Culture in France, and has exhibited at the Barbican Centre, SFMOMA, MUAC and Ars Electronica. Her work is held by Kadist, SFMOMA and the UMFA itself.
Launched in 2010, salt is an annual series of solo presentations devoted to contemporary artists from the region, the United States and abroad whose work addresses current concerns. This edition is curated by Dr. Emily Lawhead, the UMFA’s Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, who has also written the essay ‘Corn, Code, Cosmos: Ancient Intelligence in the Work of Amor Muñoz’ for an accompanying publication. Erica and Ben Dahl are the curatorial sponsors.
