In 1961, when asked to write on the survival of Indigenous iconographies in the colonial period, historian George Kubler, then an authority on the art of the ancient Americas, declared that such a “search” was akin to a “prolonged dissection of the corpse of a civilization.” Regardless of his intent to dispute the authenticity of symbols emptied of their contextual meanings for a modern age—or his desire to indirectly address the ethics of revivalist aesthetics altogether—what’s more striking is the aridity of his analogy, suggesting that the past is a desiccated husk. Kubler’s extinction verdict may well have aimed to reckon with the violence of colonialism by refusing to see artistic possibility within the carnage. Yet this idea perpetuated prevailing viewpoints during that part of the twentieth century when, as the archaeological record expanded, visions of Indigenous life shrank, reflecting a tendency to center artifacts and not the lives of those who created them. More than sixty years later, “Earth and Cosmos,” a two-person show featuring the work of Los Angeles–based artists Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza at the Americas Society, asserted the amplitude of engaging the past through a transtemporal matrix that placed objects into metaphysical, speculative, and planetary constellations.
The artists’ dialogue, evolving out of previous collaborations, recast history as an arable though scarred terrain. Much of the gallery’s floor, usually beneath Cortez’s sculptures, was covered by adobe bricks, handmade by esparza, who learned the practice from his father. Artworks and visitors occupied a translocated venue through this raised earthen platform. The pair, who also organized the show, scattered pine needles to sharpen this point: Not only does their work jointly interrogate land and its relationships to territorialization, migration, and dislocation, it also underlines the regenerative nature of soil, and of wanting or endeavoring to return to one’s origins (Cortez was born in El Salvador and relocated to Los Angeles, where esparza was born and raised by Mexican-immigrant parents). The lingering scent and audible crunch of the needles underfoot induced a sensory re-creation of place, generously crafting a portal to geographies made faraway by borders and diasporas.
The sculptures and installations here limned the politics of visibility as it concerned extraction and fetishization––the artists highlighted the way artifacts become distorted, or even unrecognizable, in the processes of looting and cross-cultural display. The show opened with esparza’s Hyperspace -100 km + ∞, 2024, a reimagining of a colossal Olmec head composed of adobe (a material that nods to familial traditions) and basalt (a substance used by the Olmecs to channel cosmic power). Warping the work’s overall shape and facial features, esparza ostensibly gives visual expression to the sculpture’s metamorphic journey, from being an object of spiritual potency to one of exoticized fascination: Ancient Olmec stone heads were put on display in the New York World’s Fair of 1965 (a photograph of one being lowered in front of the Seagram Building’s hypermodern glass-curtain wall even graced the cover of Artforum’s October issue the following year). Here, esparza’s bruised vessel, with its rough-hewn and cracked surface, records and recovers history.
Relatedly, both artists position their works as “time travelers,” things that traverse past, present, and future in nonlinear circuits. In adjacent galleries, Cortez displayed a 3D printed sculpture modeled after a sacred Mayan Tenon that was stolen in the 1870s by a group of students from Williams College in Massachusetts during an expedition to Honduras and Belize in an episode of cultural theft originally condoned as a form of scholarly “research.” Cortez’s re-creations express a conflictual yearning to align with ancestral heritage—a speculative return to one’s severed origins through imperfect mimicry and memory. To this point, replicas of other Mesoamerican artifacts donated to the museum at Williams College laid bare their imitative farce: Traditional stoneware, for instance, was replaced with loud, bright plastics and lustrous steel. These slippages in visuality, of course, are meant to defy flat-footed historicism and center the forced migration of objects that is typically minimized by claims of institutional authority, knowledge production, and preservation. Still, Cortez and esparza’s “copies” are lush and pulsating; they court the abundance of the pre-Columbian record, hold the gifts of passed-down customs, and elongate a cosmic temporality of object circulations. The artists may not be reanimating the corpse, but instead may be pointing to its already vivid, if entangled, afterlives.
