Crossing Temporalities: A Conversation with Beatriz Cortez
February 7, 2026 | 1:00 p.m.
Artist Talk
Free ticketed admission
California Museum of Photography & Culver Center of the Arts
Event Info
1:00-2:30 p.m. Artist presentation and conversation with Jasmine Magaña
2:30-3:00 p.m. Tour with exhibition curators Elena Shtromberg and Zanna Gilbert
Artist Beatriz Cortez will discuss her work followed by a conversation with scholar Jasmine Magaña. Cortez will address questions of scale, crossing temporalities, and nomadism. The conversation will build on these themes to explore Cortez’s career-long investigation of the various ways messages, stories, and elemental particles move through, as well as bring together different spaces and times. In addition, the participants will discuss artistic exchange and other ways to confront past erasures and disappearances.
This program is presented in conjunction with Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s–2020s, on view at UCR ARTS California Museum of Photography through February 15, 2026.
Speakers
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist born in El Salvador and based in Los Angeles and Davis, California. Her work explores simultaneity, multiple temporalities, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. Her recent solo and international exhibitions include Commonwealth and Council (2025, 2022); 60th International Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere (2024); 14th Shanghai Biennial, Cosmos Cinema (2023-24); and Storm King Art Center (2023). She teaches sculpture and theory at the University of California, Davis.
Jasmine Magaña is a research specialist for the Latin American and Latinx Art Initiative (LALAI) at the Getty Research Institute. Her work explores artistic practices of collectivity, radical pedagogy, and urban intervention by artists in Central America and its diasporas. She holds an M.A. in Art History & Visual Studies from Duke, an M.A. in Art History & Theory from the University of Essex, and a B.A. from Seattle University.
Elena Shtromberg is professor of art history at the University of Utah. She is the author of Art Systems: Brazil and the 1970s (UT Press, 2016), and co-editor of Encounters in Video Art in Latin America (Getty Pubs, 2023). She is co-curator of Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s-2020s.
Zanna Gilbert is co-lead of the Latin American and Latinx Art History Initiative (LALAI). She is co-curator of Transgresoras: Mail Art and Messages, 1960s–2020s and How to Be a Guerrilla Girl (Getty Research Institute, 2025–6). She is co-editor of the recent publication Ed Ruscha’s Streets of Los Angeles: Artist, Image, Archive, City (2025).
Left photo credit: Ruben Diaz
Right image credit: Beatriz Cortez, Photo documentation of No Cages, No Jaulas, 2020. Sky-typing over Los Angeles Immigration Court. Courtesy of the artist and In Plain Sight, photo by Dee Gonzalez.
