Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza

Aruna D’Souza

In a new exhibition by the two artists, a spectacular collision of land and tradition, borders and migration.

Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos, installation view. Courtesy Art at Americas Society. Photo: Arturo Sanchez.

Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos, Americas Society, 680 Park Avenue, New York City, through May 17, 2025

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Earth and Cosmos, an exhibition of work by rafa esparza and Beatriz Cortez at the Americas Society, curated by the artists themselves, revolves around two cataclysms. The first is an asteroid’s collision with Earth sixty-six million years ago, leaving a two-hundred-kilometer-wide crater off the Yucatán Peninsula, near what is now the town of Chicxulub Pueblo. The impact triggered an extinction-level event wherein 75 percent of life on the planet was wiped out, thanks to waves of earthquakes and clouds of dust and ejecta—space matter—that blanketed the planet in a thick layer of clay. The second was the eruption of the Ilopango volcano in El Salvador somewhere around the fifth or sixth century CE. That explosion, known as the Tierra Blanca Joven, sent a volcanic plume fifty kilometers into the air, to the outer edge of the stratosphere. Around the world, ash obscured the sun, contributing to a climate shift; rivers of lava, coming from deep within the earth’s mantle, hardened into basalt stone when they reached the surface.

Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos, installation view. Courtesy Art at Americas Society. Photo: Arturo Sanchez.

These two disasters are a compelling starting point for an exhibition dominated by the materials associated with those events—dust, clay, basalt—and that delves into both geological and cosmological understandings of time. But the framing becomes even more fitting in light of the artists’ engagement with a long-standing and utterly perverse reality: even as empire-builders of the Global North have tried so hard to abscond with art and artifacts from around the world, they have taken extraordinary measures to ensure that the descendants of those objects’ makers are held at bay by borders and walls. Environmental disasters, on the contrary, tend not to respect the limits of the nation-state.

Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos, installation view. Courtesy Art at Americas Society. Photo: Arturo Sanchez. Pictured: rafa esparza, Hyperspace: -100km + ∞, 2024. Adobe, steel mesh, rebar, and basalt.

The show opens spectacularly with esparza’s Hyperspace: -100 km + ∞ (2024), a sculpture based on an Olmec colossal head. The artist has fashioned it out of his preferred medium, adobe—which he learned to work with from his father, a master of the craft—and adorned it with basalt, the stone the Olmec used for these monuments back in the first millennium BCE. Materially, then, the piece nods in many directions: to lava’s status as a connection between the Earth’s core (or underworld, as the Olmecs and other Mesoamerican cultures understood it) and its surface; to the thousands-of-years-long Indigenous tradition of adobe building; to the cosmic dust–infused clay out of which that adobe is made.

But there are other, more recent histories at play here, too: the head is an homage to the one that was brought to New York in 1965 for the World’s Fair, lowered by crane onto the plaza in front of the Seagram Building. This was the first time an Olmec head was displayed in New York. Though esparza conceived of his project in 2021, when he was short-listed for the High Line plinth commission, it is fitting that it has finally been realized at the Americas Society: only two years before the head landed like an alien on Fifty-Third and Park, David Rockerfeller had founded the Council of the Americas, the sister organization of the Americas Society, both of which were (and still are) housed up the street on Sixty-Eighth and Park. He did so at the request of President John F. Kennedy, who hoped such an organization could limit the spread of Fidel Castro’s political influence in Latin America via trade agreements—it’s an organization entrenched, in other words, in the economic and political policies that kick-started the waves of migration that we see today.

If esparza’s piece encodes the past and present, it also points to the future: unlike the one on which it is based, his head twists and morphs as if caught in a wormhole, like a science-fiction traveler who has not quite settled into their next location on the time-space continuum. This futurism is a strategy to counteract the way Indigenous cultures are often cast as lost civilizations. But the glitching of the form serves another purpose, esparza explained in an interview—preventing the work from being consumed “as a foreign and exotic cultural object,” as it was back in 1965, by short-circuiting the viewer’s too easy visual grasp of it.

Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos, installation view. Courtesy Art at Americas Society. Photo: Arturo Sanchez. Pictured: Beatriz Cortez, Gift of the Artist to the Ancient Object Labeled as Human Head Emerging from Monster Jaws, One Migrant to Another, in Memory of your True Name and your Land, 2022–23, recreated 2024.

Cortez regards the Mesoamerican sculptures that have made their way into American collections through excavation and looting as “forced migrants.” A stony-hued, 3D-printed replica of one of these, now located in the Williams College Museum of Art (WCMA), sits on a geometric welded-steel armature that in turn rests on a platform of adobe bricks fabricated by esparza. Cortez titles the armature Gift of the Artist to the Ancient Object Labeled as Human Head Emerging from Monster Jaws, One Migrant to Another, in Memory of your True Name and your Land (2022–23, recreated 2024). The head in question—a Mayan tenon, or sculpted building element—was stolen by Williams College students during an expedition to Honduras and Belize in the early 1870s. While Cortez’s pedestal was shown with the actual artifact at WCMA in 2023, it is a most delicious, if distinctly bitter, irony that the museum did not allow it to travel the roughly hundred and fifty miles to New York City for this show. Next to Gift of the Artist . . . is a collection of four other Mayan pieces gifted to WCMA in 1914 by an alum, but these replicas announce their ersatz nature more baldly, in colors of bright blue and green.

Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos, installation view. Courtesy Art at Americas Society. Photo: Arturo Sanchez. Pictured, foreground: Beatriz Cortez, Kaqjay, and FIEBRE Ediciones, Altar de Kaqjay, 2021.

Cortez does not re-present these stolen objects simply as an expression of loss or a rallying cry for cultural restitution; she identifies them as migrants like her, aligning them with contemporary Central American diasporas, members of communities dispersed across the world, not so different from all those particles of Ilopango volcano dust that can be found everywhere, even in Antarctica. Altar de Kaqjay (2021) makes such community ties tangible: the hammered and welded-steel facsimile of a Mayan altar was produced in collaboration with Kaqjay, a Mayan Kaqchikel collective that runs a communitarian museum in the Guatemalan town where the artifact is sited, and FIEBRE Ediciones, an independent publishing platform in Mexico. The piece’s genesis creates a human chain that stretches across borders at the same time as it enables objects to remain in place while the spiritual and cultural ideas that subtend them are able to travel wherever the inheritors of those ideas exist in the world. “Now, as we all migrate,” the artist says in the exhibition brochure, “these particles are here and elsewhere to receive us, to make our journey possible, to help us build a new home where our fruits and corn can also grow.”

Beatriz Cortez x rafa esparza: Earth and Cosmos, installation view. Courtesy Art at Americas Society. Photo: Arturo Sanchez. Pictured, platform surface beneath replicas: rafa esparza, Adobe Bricks, 2024.

But here, another irony surfaces. The adobe bricks on which Cortez’s pieces are set contain within them seeds and plant matter; esparza has often been asked by museums to treat the material with chemicals or to irradiate it to make sure the organic matter doesn’t pose a threat to other artworks—so that fruits and corn cannot grow, as it were. esparza draws a parallel between such requests—which the Americas Society did not make—and the Bracero Program (1942–64), in which Mexican migrant workers were routinely fumigated with DDT when they entered the United States. In the face of such attempts—museological and carceral—to contain the people, objects, and forms of material knowledge that migrate to this country, esparza’s adobe surfaces enact their own subtle form of resistance: as viewers walk across the room-width platform on which Altar de Kaqjay sits, the clay bricks crumble a little, and particles are tracked around the whole exhibition—an uncontrollable, ungovernable expansion, a diaspora of dust, borders be damned.

Aruna D’Souza is a writer and critic based in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new book, Imperfect Solidarities, was published by Floating Opera Press last summer.