Beatriz Cortez is a 2022–2024 Borderlands Fellow as part of the Vera List Center’s Focus Theme cycle Correction*.

Cortez’s fellowship project considers the Tierra Blanca Joven, the layer of ash deposited by the fifth century C.E. eruption of the Ilopango Volcano in what is now El Salvador. The resulting Tierra Blanca Joven is land with spiritual meaning to people who subsequently migrated and today continue to migrate from the Central American region to other territories. Crossing present and future borders and temporalities, the Tierra Blanca Joven makes visible and sacred the movement of matter and people. Engaging with Central American immigrant communities, the project is a speculative search for the Tierra Blanca Joven and a reframing of migration as a practice that is millenary, planetary, and as a practice of objects, and landscapes, a cosmic process, and not one only reserved to humans.

Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles and Davis, California. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and versions of modernity, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. She has had numerous solo exhibitions and has participated in group exhibitions nationally and internationally. She has received numerous awards, including the Latinx Artist Fellowship (2023); California Studio Manetti Shrem Artist Residency at UC Davis (2022); Longenecker-Roth Artist Residency 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. Cortez holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate from Arizona State University. She is faculty in the Studio Art Program at UD Davis.