Beatriz Cortez

Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador) is an artist and educator based in Los Angeles since 1989. She has had solo exhibitions at the Craft Contemporary (2019); Vincent Price Art Museum (2016); and Museo Municipal Tecleño (MUTE) in El Salvador (2012) and has participated in recent group exhibitions at the Queens Museum (2019); Hammer Museum (2018); Ballroom Marfa (2017); and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2017). She holds an MFA from CalArts and a PhD from Arizona State University. @beatrizcortezflores

In Childhood Bedroom (2012-2017) and The Couch of Memory (2019), Beatriz Cortez reconstructs two cornerstones of her home in El Salvador: the bedroom that she lived in for the first eighteen years of her life and the couch that her parents purchased as young immigrants in New York. Another work, The Door (2012), provides viewers with a glimpse into Cortez’s artistic reconstructions through a fragmented and sealed off portal. Taken together, these three artworks underscore the ways that dispossessed people hold onto objects and places in their memories while simultaneously commenting on the muddy ways that these memories are accessed.

Artwork caption: Beatriz Cortez, Childhood Bedroom, 2012-2017, Video installation, 4 minutes 11 seconds, Edition 2/3. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council.