I am interested in exploring multiple temporalities and simultaneity in daily life as a metaphor of cultural diversity, coexistence, and nomadism. Through my work I imagine moving through space and time, becoming other, desiring other, fragmenting our identities, disappearing, imagining a moment when we are no longer ourselves, a rigid identity that defines us, but rather, when we become part of the cosmos, fragmented multiplicities with all of the potential to move freely at light speed, crossing the time and space barrier, having untimely experiences.

I work with welded steel because it is at once organic and industrial, ancient and futuristic, it is strong and malleable, and because it evokes the labor of migrant day-laborers who work in construction and in industrial settings in the United States and who, like me, often times came from elsewhere.

Beatriz Cortez (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities, and imaginaries of the future. She has had solo exhibitions at Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles; Pitzer College Art Galleries, Claremont, CA; Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles; Clockshop, Los Angeles; Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles; Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles; Centro Cultural de España de El Salvador; Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California; and Museo Municipal Tecleño, El Salvador. Her recent group exhibitions include Frieze Sculpture in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles and Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center, New York; FUTURES at the Smithsonian Arts + Industries, Washington, D.C.; In Plain Sight at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; Candelilla, Coatlicue, and the Breathing Machine at Ballroom Marfa, in Texas; Unfolding Universes at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia; Utopian Imagination at the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York; Paroxysm of Sublime at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles; Ingestion at TEORé/Tica in San José, Costa Rica; Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas at the Queens Museum, New York; and Chronos, Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space at the Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, among others.

Cortez has received numerous awards including the Borderlands Fellowship at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York (2022-2024); Atelier Calder artist residence in Saché, France (2022); California Studio Manetti Shrem artist residence at UC Davis (2022); Longenecker-Roth artist residence at UCSD (2021); Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), Frieze LIFEWTR Inaugural Sculpture Prize (2019), Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2018), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among others. She holds an MFA in art from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American literature from Arizona State University.