Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza

Beatriz Cortez was born and raised in El Salvador. She migrated to the United States in 1989 and settled in Phoenix, Arizona. She received a Ph.D. in Latin American literature from Arizona State University (1999) and later moved to Los Angeles, where she received an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts (2015). Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions such as Trinidad: Joy Station at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles; Made in L.A. 2018 at Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas at the Queens Museum, New York; and Chronos Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space at Socrates Sculpture Park, New York. Cortez has received the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018) and the California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among other recognitions. She teaches in the Department of Central American Studies and Transborder Studies at California State University, Northridge.

rafa esparza was born and raised in Los Angeles. He 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 outside of traditional art spaces. Esparza is a recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2015), California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts (2014), and Art Matters Foundation grant (2014). He has performed in art institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and Ballroom Marfa. His solo exhibition Staring at the Sun is currently on view at MASS MoCA in Massachusetts.