Earth and Cosmos: Panel Conversation and Video Screening

Art at Americas Society and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics are pleased to present Earth and Cosmos: Panel Conversation and Video Screening featuring artists Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza, along with Carin Kuoni, senior director and chief curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, and Rachel Remick, curatorial assistant at the Museum of Modern Art. The conversation will be introduced by Aimé Iglesias Lukin, director and chief curator of Art at Americas Society.

Cortez and esparza will share insights into their work and artistic practices, in the context of the current exhibition, Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos. The program will also feature videos created by both artists, including Cortez’s video produced in collaboration with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. This program will be followed by a small cocktail reception. 

The program's recording will be available on this website and the Art at Americas Society YouTube channel.

Tuesday, May 6, 6:00 to 8:00 pm ET 
Americas Society 
680 Park Ave., New York, NY 
Register Here
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.

Left: Ilopango, the Volcano that Left features a welded steel sculpture by Beatriz Cortez that explores the migration of particles of the Tierra Blanca Joven eruption in El Salvador across the globe, a cataclysmic event that left behind a caldera now known as Lake Ilopango. The sculpture and its journey along the Hudson River were co-commissioned by EMPAC-Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Storm King Art Center, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School. The sculpture was created in part while Cortez was in residence at Atelier Calder, Saché, France. Photo Eric Brucker / EMPAC.
Right: Bust: a meditation on freedom, Men’s Central Jail, Downtown Los Angeles, CA, 2015, Performance documentation by Dorian Wood. Bust: a meditation on freedom, invites an audience to witness a break from the material confinement of concrete and the brute force architecture of incarceration that it solidifies. The video is a brief excerpt from a 3-hour durational performance captured by an audience member and peer Dorian Wood.

Speakers

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.

Carin Kuoni is a curator and writer whose work examines how contemporary artistic practices reflect and shape social, political, and cultural conditions. She is senior director/chief curator of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School and assistant professor of Visual Studies. She has curated numerous transdisciplinary exhibitions and is editor or co-editor of ten books, among them Energy Plan for the Western Man: Joseph Beuys in America; Considering Forgiveness; Entry Points: The Vera List Center Field Guide on Art and Social Justice; and Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production. Most recently, she co-edited Studies into Darkness: On the Perils and Promise of Freedom of Speech and Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change for the Vera List Center and Amherst College Press. For the Prince Claus Fund, she was editorial director of Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World.

Rachel Remick is a writer, curator and art historian based in Brooklyn. She is currently a curatorial assistant at The Museum of Modern Art, New York where she assists with the rotating presentations of the Museum’s collection. Previously, she served as an assistant curator, Art at Americas Society where she helped organize the exhibitions Sylvia Palacios Whitman: To Draw a Line with the Body, Tropical Is Political: Caribbean Art Under the Visitor Economy Regime, and Geles Cabrera: Museo Escultórico, among others. She holds an MA in art history from the University of Texas at Austin where her research focused on modern and contemporary Latin American and U.S. Latinx art. Her scholarly writing and art criticism has been published online and in print in venues such as post: notes on art in a global context (The Museum of Modern Art), Hyperallergic.com, The Brooklyn Rail, and ArtReview. In 2021, she received a Critical Writing Fellowship from Recess Art in Brooklyn, New York.