5/26/23 - 5/12/24

Beatriz Cortez

Beatriz Cortez’s work comprises simultaneous and converging temporalities, from geologic time to distant futures. Drawing on her own experience of migration and an expansive philosophical framework, her projects trouble anthropocentric perspectives and look to ancient, futuristic, and object-centered models to address the pressing concerns of the moment.   

The Portals is an exhibition in multiple locations that explores alternative genealogies of Williams College. The three outdoor components located on Main Street attend to omissions and erasures in the built environment of the campus. (See map below.) Inside the WCMA Rotunda, the immersive sound installation interrogates the stories that we selectively tell, those we remember, and those we choose to forget. In the adjacent Stoddard Gallery, the artist’s steel structures offer an embrace to two objects that came into WCMA’s collection against their will. 

Stitching together different voices that inhabited the landscape, the installations invite viewers to coexist with various people who have believed in equality, justice, curiosity, diversity, and freedom in the area where Williamstown was created, and also to imagine the cyclical dimension of these struggles that seem to repeat themselves in a nation plagued by inequality.

Curated by Lisa Dorin, Deputy Director for Curatorial Engagement

About the artist

Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts and a Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies from Arizona State University. She has had solo exhibitions at Storm King Art Center, New York (2023); the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles (2019); Clockshop, Los Angeles (2018); Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles (2016); Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles (2016); Centro Cultural de España de El Salvador (2014); and Museo Municipal Tecleño (MUTE), El Salvador (2012), among others. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including at the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019); Ballroom Marfa, TX (2019); Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai, China (2017); Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador (2016); and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016). Cortez is the recipient of the Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), the inaugural Frieze LIFEWTR Sculpture Prize (2019), the Emergency Grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts (2019), the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), the Artist Community Engagement Grant (2017), and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016). She teaches in the Department of Central American and Transborder Studies at California State University, Northridge. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.

Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador; vive y trabaja en Los Ángeles) obtuvo una Maestría en Bellas Artes en el California Institute of the Arts y un doctorado en literatura latinoamericana en Arizona State University. Ha tenido exhibiciones personales en el Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Ángeles (2019); Clockshop, Los Ángeles (2018); Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Ángeles (2016); Monte Vista Projects, Los Ángeles (2016); Centro Cultural de España de El Salvador (2014); y en el Museo Municipal Tecleño (MUTE), El Salvador (2012). Su obra ha sido incluida en numerosas exhibiciones colectivas, incluyendo en Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019); Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2019); Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2018); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); BANK/MABSOCIETY, Shanghai, China (2017); Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, Texas (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Centro Cultural Metropolitano, Quito, Ecuador (2016); y en Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2016). Cortez ha recibido el Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020); Frieze LIFEWTR Sculpture Prize (2019);  Emergency Grant de la Foundation of Contemporary Arts (2019); Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018); Artist Community Engagement Grant (2017); y California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016). Es catedrática en el Departamento de Estudios Centroamericanos y Transfronterizos en California State University, Northridge. Beatriz Cortez es representada por la galería Commonwealth and Council en Los Ángeles.

1. Speculative Speech by Lucy Terry Prince, 2023

8-channel 4:47 minute audio loop 

Created in collaboration with: Marcella Baietto, Jordan Benton, José Luis Blondet, Phillip Byrne, Dahlia Carranza, Montserrat Carranza, Young Chung, Laura Copelin, Beatriz A. de Cortez, Benjamin Cortez, Daniel Cortez, Jaime A. Cortez, Jaime B. Cortez, Kari Cortez, Nicolas Cortez, Ricardo Cortez, Lisa Dorin, Alba Escalón, Guillermo Escalón, Justine di Fiore, Susan Fitzpatrick-Behrens, Telma Gamez, Antonieta Urrutia Gamez, Ricardo Urrutia Gamez, Igor de Gandarias, Eduardo González, Lila González, Patricia González, Tatiana Guerrero, Vanessa Guerrero, Andre Keichian, Kibum Kim, Liana Krupp, Larissa Lainez, Paulina Lara, Kang Seung Lee, Nelson Lemus, Benin Lemus, Douglas Carranza Mena, Elizabeth Pérez Márquez, Arnulfo Martinez, Lashelle May, Julia Medina, Nina Menjivar, Elena Castro Morán, Hope Okere, Yansi Y. Pérez, Valeria Grinberg Pla, Daniela Lieja Quintanar, Kari Reardon, Freya Rojo, Jennyfer A. Rodriguez, Annabeth Rosen, Carlos Somoza, Christian Tedeschi, Kelvin Villalta. 

Produced at the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Taken as an infant from Africa and enslaved for over two decades, Lucy Terry Prince (born ca. 1730 West Africa; died 1821 Sunderland, Vermont), became a free woman, a landowner, poet, storyteller, and orator. She made several official addresses including a successful argument before the Vermont Supreme Court over a land dispute. She is believed to have delivered a speech to the college’s founding trustees as an appeal to gain admittance to Williams College for her son Festus, which was denied on the basis of his race. Black students would not be admitted to Williams until 1885. As there is no written record of the original speech, Speculative Speech by Lucy Terry Prince is imagined by the artist, and is given life by a chorus of voices belonging to her collaborators, students, friends, and family. Such a plea for equality remains as relevant today as it was in Prince’s time. Of the total student population at Williams, only 8 percent identifies as African American and less than 1 percent identifies as Native American.

2. Gift of the Artist to the Ancient Object Labeled as Human Head Emerging from Monster Jaws, One Migrant to Another, in Memory of your True Name and your Land, 2022-23

Gift of the Artist to the Ancient Object Labeled as Human Head Wearing a Peaked Headdress, One Migrant to Another, in Memory of your True Name and your Land, 2022-23

Steel

In the Stoddard Gallery Cortez invites us to think critically about the collection of objects WCMA stewards. Her work intervenes in a space dedicated to two Neo-Assyrian relief fragments, which were procured from a British excavation site in present-day Nimrud, Iraq, by Williams alum and missionary, Dwight Marsh, who gifted them to the college in 1851. 

Similarly, the two Maya tenons placed on top of the artist’s steel columns were obtained by Williams students on an expedition to Honduras and Belize in 1870-71 as part of The Lyceum of Natural History. The activities of this student-run organization resulted in large collections of objects being removed from their cultures of origin and brought to the college as treasures and curiosities, often with little or no contextual information about them. 

Recalling the abstracted geometries of ancient Maya architecture, Cortez’s handmade steel structures provide the tenons an alternative dwelling place to WCMA’s storage cabinets. This work engages with the idea that the tenons are not mere art objects or archaeological artifacts, but that they hold cultural and spiritual value for contemporary Maya communities as they once did for the ancient Maya. 

3. Historic House, 2022-23

Steel 

Only the exteriors of historic buildings at Williams have been deemed worthy of preservation for their historical and architectural significance. Yet their interior contents, and particularly any markers of those who labored to build and maintain them, are rendered invisible. By removing the walls of the historic house to reveal the hearth, Cortez invites us to imagine the space where these forgotten workers tended to the households of colonial settlers, many whose wealth derived directly or indirectly from slavery or dispossession of indigenous lands, and who continue to be memorialized on campus. 

4. XX, 2022-23

Steel 

The college cemetery, a short walk from here, was intended as the final resting place for tenured Williams faculty and their immediate families. Yet many who lived and worked at the college have been excluded. The graves of 18th and 19th century Black residents of Williamstown, in particular, remain unidentified and unknown to us to this day. This mound of steel rocks, shaped and welded
by hand and carefully placed here on the grass, pays solemn tribute to those unnamed and their legacies. The title XX recalls the name given to the graves of unidentified people resulting from the war in the artist’s home country of El Salvador and from migration at the Mexico and United States border.

5. Mohican Homelands, 2023

Locally sourced river rocks

The phrase “Kpomthe’nã Mã’eekanik,” which translates as “We are walking on the Mohican homeland,” was selected in consultation with members of the Stockbridge Munsee Community language program. It is inscribed here by the artist directly on the land using locally sourced stone as a visible reminder of where we are and those who have been displaced, but also as a way to celebrate the survival of the Mohican language.

Listen to the phrase recorded by the Stockbridge Munsee Community language program: