Beatriz Cortez

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.Her architectural designs were exhibited at Craft Contemporary in a show entitled Trinidad/Joy Station, which was her first major solo museum exhibition.Cortez currently teaches in the Central American Studies department at California State University, Northridge.According to Cortez's website, her work is all about exploring "simultaneity, life in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the after math of war and the experience of migration".Cortez has been honored with 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.

Tzolk'in

One of Cortez's most popular works is a sculpture called Tzolk'in. Cortez created two identical sculptures in two separate locations. One was located at the Hammer Museum, part of the Made in L.A. 2018 installation. The other sculpture was by the Los Angeles river as a site specific, independent public art sculpture. The reason for the drastically different locations was to highlight the different realities that exist within the same cities. Both of the sculptures were facing each other, even though they were twenty miles apart, the reason for this is to reference the bond that the two sculptures have to each other which is comparable to the "bond that binds two entities of the same kind across space and time."

There are technically three different sculptures of Tzolk'in in the world. Cortez recreated a virtual sculpture in order to honor the death of Claudia Gomez Gonzales, who was murdered by an American Customs and Border Protection agent, near the Rio Grande River. Cortez was able to create the virtual Tzolk'in by partnering with Nancy Baker Cahill's app 4th Wall. If the users of the app go to the site on the Rio Grande River and hold their phone up, they will be able to see the virtual sculpture.