The Volcano that Left

May 20 – November 13, 2023

Sited on Museum Hill with views of the Hudson Highlands in the distance, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left (2023) is a speculative reconstruction of an ancient volcano that erupted in the sixth century C.E. in what is now El Salvador. Composed entirely of steel, Cortez’s sculpture imagines what the Ilopango Volcano might have looked like. Rendered through the artist’s hand-made process of hammered and welded steel, Cortez’s weld marks spread across the surface of the work like cracks or fissures, evoking a geologic formation.

The Ilopango eruption, which spread what would later come to be known as Tierra Blanca Joven (Young White Earth), was one of the largest volcanic events in recorded history. At its original site what remains today is a volcanic caldera, Lake Ilopango. While there are no visual representations of the volcano, Ilopango looms large in history, its presence felt throughout the environmental and societal changes that it generated. Today, ash deposits from Tierra Blanca Joven can be found in ice core samples as far away as Greenland, reflecting the extent to which the eruption spread across the planet.

Cortez likens the movement of volcanic particles to migration, echoing the movement of the Maya who were displaced after the cataclysmic eruption, and the artist’s own migration centuries later amid the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War in 1989. About the work, Cortez has said, “My objective is to invite others to imagine long temporalities of the planet, and the Earth in flow at speeds that are too long for us to perceive from our human perspectives and senses. In part, my travels are speculative, they are an effort to trace some of the trajectories followed by Tierra Blanca Joven centuries ago, and they are meant to imagine migration as part of the future and not only as part of our present.”

In the fall, Ilopango will leave Storm King to travel up the Hudson River by boat to its next destination: EMPAC—the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Accompanied by a weekend of programming in collaboration with EMPAC and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, visitors will be able to witness the sculpture’s continued migration along the currents of the Hudson. As its title suggests, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left moves with a sense of agency, disrupting distinctions between here and there, and past and present, as it charts its own future.

Stela Z, after Quiriguá (Contrary Warrior) (2023) takes the form of a stela from Quiriguá, an ancient Mayan site in present-day Guatemala. The glyphs on Stela Z represent Ilopango, the Volcano that Left in its many stages of existence and migration, as well as each work in the exhibition as they appear on Museum Hill. Before it arrived at Storm King, the volcano traveled by container ship across the Atlantic from the Atelier Calder in Saché, France, where Cortez began the work during a residency, to the artist’s studio in Los Angeles. From there, it was transported by truck to the Art Center, and finally, will travel up the Hudson River by boat in the fall. Once Ilopango, the Volcano that Left leaves Storm King, the temporality of the Stela will shift, no longer foretelling the Volcano’s future movements, but instead documenting the travels of its past.

Stela Z is the latest in the artist’s series of steel stelae, which she names out of order to disrupt the alphabetic naming conventions used in colonial archeological practices. The parenthetical aspect of the artwork’s title refers to the Native American concept of a contrary, a warrior who acts in deliberate opposition to those around them, breaking with preconceived notions and moving through time and space like a nomad. By retooling an ancient architectural form of documenting historical events for the present and an imagined future, Cortez’s stela resists linear temporality and opposes a normative narrative interpretation.

Cosmic Mirror (The Sky over New York) (2022, reconfigured 2023) is formed by eleven boulders made of hammered steel with patina nestled into the grass of Museum Hill like asteroids that have fallen to earth from the cosmos. The steel boulders are arranged in the pattern of what in the Western world is called Orion, a constellation that has been given many names by other cultures including the Maya, though not known to us now. Cortez chose the form of this constellation because it is at different times of the year both visible over New York, where the work is currently installed, and Los Angeles, where the artist’s studio is located. The work’s relative position to the stars changes based on its geographic location, illustrating that no two vantage points of the sky are the same.

The sculpture was inspired by an ancient Olmec mosaic of a jaguar’s head that was buried immediately after it was laid, meant to be visible to the underworld, which is a sacred place in Mayan culture. Cortez explains that “Lava flows under the volcanic range that unites my two homes, Los Angeles and San Salvador. The underworld is not divided by these borders.”

In considering the different ways Cosmic Mirror could be experienced, Cortez decenters the role of the human viewer, instead imagining the work to be observed at a great distance, either from above or below. Cortez considers Cosmic Mirror to be a hyperobject, meaning a concept or phenomenon beyond human comprehension.

Beatriz Cortez: The Volcano That Left is organized by Eric Booker, Associate Curator, with the assistance of Adela Goldsmith, Curatorial Assistant.