Ms. Lehr has lived most of her life in Miami Beach. As she was raising a family, she helped start an art collective “for women who were equally adrift and feeling isolated.” The women sponsored workshops and organized “small potatoes shows to support each other.”

Ms. Lehr mainly works with paints and colored inks, but for more than a decade she has been creating accents and shapes with flames from a small butane torch and by igniting gunpowder and string-like explosive fuses on her canvases. The burned fuses stick to the canvas for a mixed media effect and often look like vines or the stems of plants.

“It’s dangerous and it’s exciting,” she said of the gunpowder. “It’s what my work is all about: beauty and its opposites, danger and destruction.”

In her current exhibition, she turned a room in the museum into a small movie theater. On a big screen, a dark, menacing ocean pulses on a deserted beach, murmuring in a low funereal chant. On the side walls she hung cutout shapes of staghorn corals covered with mirrored glass. The mirrors flicker with reflections of a warming, acidic ocean that has been devastating coral reefs around the world.

Oblong shadows fall across the theater screen, cast by dangling light bulbs, the kind that laboratory scientists use to accelerate the growth of new generations of coral. “We have to think of the loss and destruction and that there is more of this to come,” Ms. Lehr said. “But it’s not too late. We have the knowledge and ability to stop the destruction.”