In this lecture, 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellow Beatriz Cortez charts the different ways in which her monumental sculpture Ilopango, the Volcano that Left counters ideas about permanence, portals, and multiple temporalities.

Currently on view at Storm King Art Center, the exhibition Beatriz Cortez: The Volcano That Left brings together new and recent large-scale sculptures by the El Salvador–born (1970), Los Angeles–based artist. Central to the exhibition is Ilopango, the Volcano that Left (2023), the speculative reconstruction of an ancient volcano that erupted in the sixth century C.E. in what is now El Salvador. Cortez considers the ash deposited by the eruption, an event known as Tierra Blanca Joven, as part of the sacred Mayan underworld. The artist imagines how the eruption’s resulting migratory patterns reverberate across time, drawing connection to events such as the movement of the Maya or her own migration amid the Salvadoran Civil War in 1989, a catastrophe that displaced a million people. The volcano will be traveling up the Hudson River to EMPAC–Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute from October 27 through 29. For more information on the volcano’s route and how to view it journey, please visit EMPAC’s website here.

For the Parsons Fine Arts Visiting Artist Lecture, the artist engages with the conceptual content carried by movement and impermanence. In particular, Cortez discusses her plans for the journey of her sculpture on the Hudson River, a voyage across water, land, time, and tides.