Artist Beatriz Cortez in Conversation With Curator Erin Christovale

September 24, 2020

Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist originally from El Salvador and currently based in Los Angeles. Her work explores life in different temporalities and versions of modernity through memory, loss, experiences of migration, and the aftermath of war. In 2019, she was awarded the inaugural Frieze Arto LIFEWTR® Sculpture Prize to create a sculpture for Rockefeller Plaza in New York City, where the commissioned sculpture was inaugurated on September 1, 2020. Cortez teaches in the Department of Central American Studies at California State University, Northridge. 

Erin Christovale is associate curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and co-founder of the experimental film and video program, Black Radical Imagination, with Amir George. Christovale is best known for her work on identity, race, and historical legacy. She was co-curator of the 2018 Made In LA exhibition at the Hammer Museum, which featured a multi-site sculptural installation by Beatriz Cortez.

Pictured at top: Trinidad: Joy Station. 2019. Installation view at Craft Contemporary. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Gina Clyne.