www.coeuretart.com:
Beatriz Cortez, Generosity I, 2019.
Steel, acrylic and plastic containers, zip ties, and corn, amaranth, quinoa, sorghum, and black bean seeds, 160 x 91 x 91 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
www.monumentlab.com:
The seeds that are part of Generosity I and Generosity II, which is now on view at the MSU Broad Museum in Michigan, evoke the technological advances and the knowledge of ancient peoples sent across time for all of us to survive in the present and for others to survive in the future.
In this way, this space capsule imagines the concept of generosity as a gift that was sent towards the future, to unknown others by the ancestors. I love this message that it carries as well, it is an invitation for each of us to also send gifts of generosity towards unknown others whom we will never meet and who will recirculate these and other gifts towards yet unknown others. In addition, the seeds, and the plants that will grow from them, will carry that ancient knowledge, and in many ways the cultural, spiritual, cosmic content of their survival on Earth, which includes their collaboration with humans during the Anthropocene.
The plants are evidence of collaborative and often communal, intergenerational care and interspecies shared initiatives. I think that another world is possible with the same resources that we have. This is why I decided to make the bed, crib, petate, shelter, awnings that I made as part of the Cosmic series, all with the same materials that surround the children in the detention centers.
www.coeuretart.com:
As I was working on this proposal, I spent time walking through New York City, and I understood that the glacial erratics are an important presence in the city, and that they were moved there by the planet millions of years before our time.
And this is how I began research and to understand that during the Ice Age, the melting ice opened grooves on the Manhattan bedrock and also deposited numerous glacial erratics all over the landscape. These large masses of rock in mineral content, in look, in size, and shape, from the native rocks in the local landscape.
In Central Park, in Prospect Park, in Battle Hill, in the Bronx, among many others all over the City, the matter that forms these rocks documents their migration before the human era, as well as the moment in which they emerged from the ice cap cover.
www.monumentlab.com:
I think the migration crisis makes it impossible for us not to think transnationally or outside the diagram of the nation because so many lives are tied to multiple spaces, families and communities are divided by borders. However, there are non-human reasons to this as well. For instance, lava flows under the volcanic range that unites my two homes, Los Angeles and San Salvador. The underworld is not divided by these borders.
The narrative of nationalism pushes Indigenous peoples towards a past and circulates the idea that Indigenous people who are alive, creating, producing, and thinking, are part of the past, sometimes of a backward past and sometimes of a glorious past, but are part of a past that enabled the contemporary national subject that we are supposed to incarnate. This is where ideas such as Indigenous people being our roots come from. These are violent ideas that would require for Indigenous peoples to be buried under the ground for us to exist as such.
I want to imagine not only Indigenous survival, I want to engage in a transnational and transtemporal conversation with Indigenous ancient and contemporary ideas, and to imagine the survival of Indigenous peoples in the future.
www.monumentlab.com:
Her sculptural work engages with migration as an experience of colliding times and spaces. Past, present, and future coincide; memory informs the present and mobilizes to imagine better futures. Cortez s work is often speculative, invoking otherworldly refuges like the space station. It is also resolutely material, invested in the dialogue between a piece of steel and the natural elements. Her monuments to immigrants both human and nonhuman destabilize the monument s longstanding association with fixity and instead pay tribute to nomadic simultaneity, to what has come before and what could yet be.
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar based in Los Angeles. After growing up in San Salvador, at the age of eighteen, Cortez fled El Salvador s Civil War.
Her work is currently on view throughout the Americas, from the Museo de Arte de El Salvador and Panama City s Museo de Arte Contempor neo, to MSU Broad Art Museum and finally to The Lux Art Institute.
www.vogue.mx:
El estudio de Beatriz Cortez muestra paredes blancas, hay un escritorio de madera y varios libros. Me invita a tomar asiento en un sof que ella misma hab a soldado a os atr s. Justo a mi lado se encuentra Generosity I una c psula alta de acero que se balancea sobre tres patas delgadas .
Sobre algunas placas hay unas peque as a adiduras llenas de ma z, frijoles, quinoa, amaranto y otras semillas ind genas. Beatriz me explica que cuando lleguen otros tiempos, despu s de la destrucci n del medioambiente y del planeta y pueda haber vida nuevamente, ser Generosity I la que preservar para ese futuro lo que fue posible una vez para nosotros, gracias a la sabidur a de nuestros ancestros.
www.wikipedia.org:
Beatriz Cortez is a Los Angeles based artist and scholar from El Salvador.
In 2017, Cortez was featured in a science fiction-themed exhibit at University of California, Riverside, and in 2018, her work was shown in the Made in L.A. group artist exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She holds a Ph.D in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She also earned an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Cortez currently teaches in the Central American Studies department at California State University, Northridge.
According to Cortez, her work explores 'simultaneity, life in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration. Cortez has received the 2018 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, the 2017 Artist Community Engagement Grant, and the 2016 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.
Beatriz Cortez, Generosity I, 2019.
Steel, acrylic and plastic containers, zip ties, and corn, amaranth, quinoa, sorghum, and black bean seeds, 160 x 91 x 91 cm. Courtesy: the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles
www.monumentlab.com:
The seeds that are part of Generosity I and Generosity II, which is now on view at the MSU Broad Museum in Michigan, evoke the technological advances and the knowledge of ancient peoples sent across time for all of us to survive in the present and for others to survive in the future.
In this way, this space capsule imagines the concept of generosity as a gift that was sent towards the future, to unknown others by the ancestors. I love this message that it carries as well, it is an invitation for each of us to also send gifts of generosity towards unknown others whom we will never meet and who will recirculate these and other gifts towards yet unknown others. In addition, the seeds, and the plants that will grow from them, will carry that ancient knowledge, and in many ways the cultural, spiritual, cosmic content of their survival on Earth, which includes their collaboration with humans during the Anthropocene.
The plants are evidence of collaborative and often communal, intergenerational care and interspecies shared initiatives. I think that another world is possible with the same resources that we have. This is why I decided to make the bed, crib, petate, shelter, awnings that I made as part of the Cosmic series, all with the same materials that surround the children in the detention centers.
www.coeuretart.com:
As I was working on this proposal, I spent time walking through New York City, and I understood that the glacial erratics are an important presence in the city, and that they were moved there by the planet millions of years before our time.
And this is how I began research and to understand that during the Ice Age, the melting ice opened grooves on the Manhattan bedrock and also deposited numerous glacial erratics all over the landscape. These large masses of rock in mineral content, in look, in size, and shape, from the native rocks in the local landscape.
In Central Park, in Prospect Park, in Battle Hill, in the Bronx, among many others all over the City, the matter that forms these rocks documents their migration before the human era, as well as the moment in which they emerged from the ice cap cover.
www.monumentlab.com:
I think the migration crisis makes it impossible for us not to think transnationally or outside the diagram of the nation because so many lives are tied to multiple spaces, families and communities are divided by borders. However, there are non-human reasons to this as well. For instance, lava flows under the volcanic range that unites my two homes, Los Angeles and San Salvador. The underworld is not divided by these borders.
The narrative of nationalism pushes Indigenous peoples towards a past and circulates the idea that Indigenous people who are alive, creating, producing, and thinking, are part of the past, sometimes of a backward past and sometimes of a glorious past, but are part of a past that enabled the contemporary national subject that we are supposed to incarnate. This is where ideas such as Indigenous people being our roots come from. These are violent ideas that would require for Indigenous peoples to be buried under the ground for us to exist as such.
I want to imagine not only Indigenous survival, I want to engage in a transnational and transtemporal conversation with Indigenous ancient and contemporary ideas, and to imagine the survival of Indigenous peoples in the future.
www.monumentlab.com:
Her sculptural work engages with migration as an experience of colliding times and spaces. Past, present, and future coincide; memory informs the present and mobilizes to imagine better futures. Cortez s work is often speculative, invoking otherworldly refuges like the space station. It is also resolutely material, invested in the dialogue between a piece of steel and the natural elements. Her monuments to immigrants both human and nonhuman destabilize the monument s longstanding association with fixity and instead pay tribute to nomadic simultaneity, to what has come before and what could yet be.
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist and scholar based in Los Angeles. After growing up in San Salvador, at the age of eighteen, Cortez fled El Salvador s Civil War.
Her work is currently on view throughout the Americas, from the Museo de Arte de El Salvador and Panama City s Museo de Arte Contempor neo, to MSU Broad Art Museum and finally to The Lux Art Institute.
www.vogue.mx:
El estudio de Beatriz Cortez muestra paredes blancas, hay un escritorio de madera y varios libros. Me invita a tomar asiento en un sof que ella misma hab a soldado a os atr s. Justo a mi lado se encuentra Generosity I una c psula alta de acero que se balancea sobre tres patas delgadas .
Sobre algunas placas hay unas peque as a adiduras llenas de ma z, frijoles, quinoa, amaranto y otras semillas ind genas. Beatriz me explica que cuando lleguen otros tiempos, despu s de la destrucci n del medioambiente y del planeta y pueda haber vida nuevamente, ser Generosity I la que preservar para ese futuro lo que fue posible una vez para nosotros, gracias a la sabidur a de nuestros ancestros.
www.wikipedia.org:
Beatriz Cortez is a Los Angeles based artist and scholar from El Salvador.
In 2017, Cortez was featured in a science fiction-themed exhibit at University of California, Riverside, and in 2018, her work was shown in the Made in L.A. group artist exhibition at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She holds a Ph.D in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She also earned an M.F.A. from the California Institute of the Arts. Cortez currently teaches in the Central American Studies department at California State University, Northridge.
According to Cortez, her work explores 'simultaneity, life in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration. Cortez has received the 2018 Rema Hort Mann Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, the 2017 Artist Community Engagement Grant, and the 2016 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.