Tzolk’in

Tzolk’in
Beatriz Cortez 

June 3, 2018 – September 2, 2018
The Bowtie Project

Tzolk’in is a site specific sculpture by Los Angeles-based artist Beatriz Cortez. Inspired by 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 created a second sculpture for Made in L.A. 2018, the Hammer Museum’s biennial exhibition. The sculptures’ contrasting locations—a museum setting in Westwood and a former railyard in Glassell Park—invites 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.

In 2019, Tzolk’in was exhibited in New York as part of a sculpture exchange program between Clockshop and Socrates Sculpture Park.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
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 DC, 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.

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