Beatriz Cortez

Beatriz Cortez is an artist who creates sculptures and large-scale public installations that focus on themes of migration, movement, and cultural exchange. Drawing inspiration from her own experience of immigrating to the United States from El Salvador, she incorporates indigenous elements such as plants and stones from the Americas into her sculptures to highlight the parallels between the migration of people and plants. In her public installations, she includes weather and other atmospheric conditions to encourage viewers to consider the vast time spans marked by the planet's movements, the presence of non-human worlds with different timeframes all around us, and the ways in which materials are affected by their location and interactions with the environment. Her most popular work, Tzolk’in (2018), is a large-scale mechanical sculpture that incorporates elements of Mayan cosmology and technology. The machine is inspired by the ancient Maya calendar that was used for agriculture, and its gears move in a way that combines circular and linear motion. Her work imagines a new kind of space that brings together different histories and cultures, acknowledging global and cosmic nomadism and envisioning the potential for divergent entities to coexist. ...

Commonwealth and Council is a gallery in Koreatown, Los Angeles founded in 2010. Our program is rooted in our commitment to explore how a community of artists can sustain our co-existence through generosity and hospitality. Commonwealth and Council celebrates our manifold identities and experiences through the shared dialogue of art—championing practices by women, queer, POC, and our ally artists to build counter-histories that reflect our individual and collective realities.