CSU's ConSortiUm of Art Galleries and Museums 2020-2022 Event Series

Beatriz Cortez, Tzolk'in I, 2018. Steel, motor, battery, timer, solar panel, acrylic, and lacquer marker. 132 x 64.5 x 64.5 inches. Commissioned by
Clockshop. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo Credit: Scott Lynch, Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY. 

Tzolk’in is a sculpture in two parts commissioned by Clockshop the Hammer Museum as part of the Made in L.A. 2018 biennial. Inspired by the ancient Maya 260-day calendar for agriculture, the gears in this sculpture follow a hypocycloid motion, marking time through a movement that is at once circular and linear. 

Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Her work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and versions of modernity, memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures.

She has had solo exhibitions at the Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles; Clockshop, Los Angeles; Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles; Monte Vista Projects, Los Angeles; Centro Cultural de España de El Salvador; Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California; and Museo Municipal Tecleño, El Salvador. Her recent group exhibitions include In Plain Sight at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; Candelilla, Coatlicue, and the Breathing Machine at Ballroom Marfa, in Texas; Unfolding Universes at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia; Utopian Imagination at the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York; Paroxysm of Sublime at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles; Ingestion at TEORé/Tica in San José, Costa Rica; Mundos Alternos: Art and Science Fiction in the Americas at the Queens Museum, New York; and Chronos, Cosmos: Deep Time, Open Space at the Socrates Sculpture Park, New York.

Cortez has received the 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. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and a doctorate in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She teaches at California State University, Northridge. Beatriz Cortez is represented by Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.

Erin Christovale is the Associate Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the co-founder of the experimental film program, Black Radical Imagination, with Amir George.

Exhibitions include a/wake in the water: Meditations on Disaster (2014) at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Memoirs of A Watermelon Woman (2016) and A Subtle Likeness (2016) at the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives, and S/Election: Democracy, Citizenship, Freedom (2016) at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Made in L.A. (2018), the Hammer Museum's biennial with Anne Ellegood. Recent projects include solo presentations of artists Jamilah Sabur (2019), Ja'Tovia Gary (2020) and belonging (2019), a collection show responding to bell hook's collection of essays, Belonging: A Culture of Place, at the Hammer Museum.

Film programs include Black Radical Imagination (ongoing), Let It Be Known (2016) as part of Clockshop's, Radio Imagination, a series of programs and artist commissions exploring the legacy of Octavia E. Butler, ALTERNATE ENDINGS, RADICAL BEGINNINGS (2017) with Vivian Crockett as part of Visual AIDS’ project, "A Day With(Out) Art", and Cosmic Mumbo Jumbo (2019) as part of Kadist Video Library Online Video Exhibition series. 

Forensic Architecture, still from Triple Chaser, 2019. Image credit: Forensic Architecture, Praxis Films.

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London. They undertake advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights organizations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organizations.

They investigate state and corporate violence, human rights violations and environmental destruction all over the world. Their work often involves open-source investigation, the construction of digital and physical models, 3D animations, virtual reality environments and cartographic platforms.

Within these environments they locate and analyze photographs, videos, audio files and testimonies to reconstruct and analyze violent events. They also use thier digital models as tools for interviewing survivors of violence, finding new ways to access and explore memories of trauma.

Forensic Architecture, Sea Watch vs Libyan Coast Guard (with Forensic Oceanography), 2018. Image credit: Forensic Oceanography and Forensic Architecture.

Eyal Weizman is the founding director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he founded the Centre for Research Architecture in 2005.

The author of over 15 books, he has conducted research and taught at many universities worldwide. He was a Global Scholar at Princeton University and a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is a member of several managing and advisory boards, including the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and the board of trustees of the Centre for Investigative Journalism. He is also a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine.

Eyal studied architecture at the Architectural Association, graduating in 1998. He received his PhD in 2006 from the London Consortium at Birkbeck, University of London.

Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Photo Credit: Courtesy Virginia Museum of Fine Arts; Travis Fullerton, photographer.

Valerie Cassel Oliver is the Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. Prior to her position at the VMFA, she was Senior Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston where worked from 2000 - 2017.  She has served as director of the Visiting Artist Program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1995-2000) and a program specialist at the National Endowment for the Arts (1988-1995).   In 2000 she was one of six curators selected to organize the Biennial for the Whitney Museum of American Art.  

During her tenure at the CAMH, Cassel Oliver organized numerous exhibitions including the acclaimed Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art Since 1970 (2005); Cinema Remixed & Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970 with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee (2009); a major retrospective on Benjamin Patterson, Born in the State of Flux/us (2010) and Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art (2012). She has also mounted significant survey exhibitions for Donald Moffett, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Jennie C. Jones, Angel Otero and Annabeth Rosen.    

Her 2018 debut exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was a 50-year survey of work by Howardena Pindell entitled Howardena Pindell: What Remains to be Seen.  The exhibition co-organized with Naomi Beckwith, the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, was named one of the most influential of the decade. Most recently, Cassel Oliver organized the exhibition, Cosmologies from the Tree of Life that featured over thirty newly acquired works from the Souls Grown Deep Foundation.  She is currently developing the group exhibition, The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture and the Sonic Impulse, scheduled to open at the VMFA May, 2021. 

Cassel Oliver is the recipient of a Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship (2007); the High Museum of Art’s David C. Driskell Award (2011); the Arthur and Carol Kaufman Goldberg Foundation-to-Life Fellowship at Hunter College (2016) and the James A. Porter Book Award from Howard University (2018). From 2016-17, she was a Senior Fellow in Curatorial Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and, in Spring, 2020 she participated in the University of Texas at Austin’s View Points series with Hamza Walker. 

Cassel Oliver holds a M.A. in art history from Howard University in Washington, D.C. and, B.S. in communications from the University of Texas at Austin.