Tzolk’in is a site specific sculpture by LA-based artist Beatriz Cortez at the Bowtie Project, produced by Clockshop.

Modeled on an ancient 260-day agricultural calendar, Tzolk’in uses a hypocycloid motion to mark time through movement that is both linear and cyclical. Tzolk’in is a project in two parts. Cortez has created a second sculpture for Made in L.A. 2018, the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition, on view from June 3 – September 2. The sculptures’ contrasting locations — a museum setting in Westwood and a former rail yard in Glassell Park — invite audiences to reflect on the different realities that exist in these disparate parts of the city, as well as the ways these locations may be connected.

Beatriz Cortez is an artist, a writer, and an educator. She was born in El Salvador and has lived in the United States since 1989. Her work explores simultaneity, the existence in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of immigration, and in relation to imagining possible futures. She has exhibited her work nationally in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington D.C., New York, Minneapolis, and Miami, and internationally in El Salvador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Ecuador. She holds an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She is professor of Central American Studies at California State University, Northridge. She lives and works in Los Angeles.

This project is made possible with support from the Pasadena Art Alliance and the Department of Cultural Affairs.