Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos Pocket Book
Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos Pocket Book
This is a publication released to accompany Americas Society’s exhibition about the conversations and collaborations between the Los Angeles-based artists.
This fully illustrated publication accompanies the Americas Society exhibition Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos.
Cortez and esparza have over the years engaged in conversations about ancient and contemporary ideas of the Earth, the cosmos, the underworld, and the knowledge developed by ancient Indigenous people. These discussions inform their practices and have also led to numerous co-created projects such as Nomad 13, Xolotl's Time Travels, Solar Star, Puente, and Portal Sur, after Copán. Expanding on these dialogues, Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos presents works selected by the artists that speak to the movement of this ancient knowledge through the flow of all beings and matter across the cosmos.
Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos inaugurates a series in which Americas Society invites two artists who are friends and collaborators to jointly explore how they influence each other's work. This new approach shares insight into a vital part of artistic production that is seldom the subject of exhibitions: the conversations that artists have with colleagues and companions that inform and enrich their practice.
Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador; lives and works in Los Angeles and Davis) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores memory, movement, and migration, as well as the experience of simultaneity, multiple temporalities, and speculative imaginaries. Her work explores untimely, time-traveling forms of communication and community building. Her sculptures function as metaphors of long temporalities, nomadism, and multiplicity. Her installations construct possible interventions in the chronological order of time and nonhuman temporalities and perspectives. Her collaborations with others explore the emergence of collective subjectivities as well as transborder and transtemporal forms of being. She teaches sculpture at the University of California, Davis.
rafa esparza (b. 1981, Pasadena; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. esparza’s recent projects are grounded in laboring with land and adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist invites Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects, gathering people together to build networks of support in and outside of traditional art spaces.
-2.png)
Table of contents
- Foreword by Susan Segal
- “Artists Sharing” by Aimé Iglesias Lukin
- “A Conversation” by Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza
- Works
- Part One: Prior Collaborations Codex (Nomad 13)
- Part Two: Earth and Cosmos
- Altar de Kaqjay by Kaqjay
- Artist Biographies
- Credits
- Acknowledgments
See all Americas Society publications.
Price: $5. To purchase this catalog, please contact: art@as-coa.org or order on Amazon.
The exhibition is organized by the artists, with exhibition coordination by Sarah Lopez.
Visual Arts exhibition series editors: Aimé Iglesias Lukin and Karen Marta
Associate editor: Tatiana Marcel
This exhibition, open through May, highlights the ongoing conversations and collaborations between the Los Angeles-based artists.
.png)