At the Americas Society, a Show Honoring Olmec Art Challenges Museums

Temporal dislocation—the sensation of experiencing multiple temporalities at once—can be felt inside three galleries of New York’s Americas Society /Council of the Americas, now host to the latest collaboration of Beatriz Cortez and rafa esparza.

Titled “Earth and Cosmos,” it’s exhibition of sculpture and installation art with vast ambitions. Here, visitors will pass through the planet’s core, exiting in southern Mexico, where the ancient Olmec civilization began, with a side trip to Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood. And all without leaving Manhattan.

“The Americas Society is linked to the idea of a nation, to the idea of how the United States relates to Latin America, what kind of power is in that relationship,” Cortez told ARTnews, speaking within the gallery. “[David] Rockefeller himself established this place, and he’s the one who moved the [Olmec artifacts].”

For both artists, the extraction of art to the United States is where this show begins. Cortez, who immigrated to the US from El Salvador when she was 18, and esparza, who was born and raised in Los Angeles by Mexican immigrants, both draw heavily on the material, memories, and myths of their ancestors. Nearly all the works on view at the Americas Society honor antiquity from the ancient Americas, not unlike the artist’s past collaborations.

The Americas Society announced “Earth and Cosmos” (through May 17) as the first in a series of shows that invites two longtime collaborators to build an exhibition based on their relationship without the intervention of a curator. In press materials, the institution has said it’s team is there for the purpose of “facilitating dialogues” between the artists, if needed.

Based on this presentation, the role of a curator is to interpret relationships between people and objects, and, in certain cases, between artists. This, the series contends, is a matter of control, as even mild readings interject personality (so, politics) into an artist’s production, and even amiable curators answer to their higher power. Cortez and esparza, and the artists to follow in this series, are ultimately in pursuit of alternatives to this conceptual hierarchy. It’s always a good time for that, but this a seriously good time—a crisis of censorship and funding in Western cultural institutions suggests that nothing of the creative process is inviolable, least of all an artist’s intent.

Lesser imaginations would have explored an institutional concern like, ‘How can curators better serve artists?’ That’s for a panel debate; this is a conversation between friends about Indigeneity, queerness, and imperialism. They reject the moral relativism that allows museums, or at least the encyclopedic ones, to categorize civilizations as dead and exploitable. The pair arrive at a less traveled destination, ‘What role has exhibition-making played in encouraging an idea of the Other?’

The materials do the talking, mostly. Hyperspace -100 km + ∞is (2024) is an homage to the colossal Olmec head that was brought to New York from Mexico for display in the 1965 World Fair. (The title refers to the journey of molten magma from Earth’s crust to the surface.) To make the piece, esparza used his family’s recipe for adobe, which he mixed with basalt, the stone material from which sacred Olmec heads were sculpted.

“The Olmec head is a symbol of a moment when Latin American works of art were brought to New York to speak about Latin America, but as part of a past. And obviously that is not the case,” esparza said at the gallery. “Indigenous peoples are alive. We are collaborating with Indigenous communities today .”

There’s a photograph of the original—a sculpture older than the United States, and from a civilization to which many Mesoamericans owe an artistic debt—being lowered by crane into the plaza of the Seagram Building. Hyperspace is a to-scale homage to the massive original. Its features are uncanny: the deep-set face appears to ripple, as though it were composed of glitching pixels that fall into place. The intent, the artist said, was to afford its spirit a semblance of privacy.

“Seeing it hanging like that, with no padding, is horrifying, but also to see it out of its historical and spiritual context was interesting,” Cortez said. “We had to figure out: What does it mean to bring this Olmec head here? How did it become this exotic object?” 

Throughout the galleries, steel works by Cortez have been placed on and around adobe brick installations by esparza. Adobe is central to their joint practice but more typical in their outdoor installations. Fragrant pine needles were scattered on the floor around the packed, cracking blocks.

“When I started to have conversations with museums about how they would exhibit [the adobe], the protocol that they adhered to was one that always suggested we spray with them pesticide or zap them with radiation, to kill any microorganisms that could grow in the plant and contaminate other works in the collection,” esparza said, referring to his past participations in biennials at the Hammer Museum in LA and the Whitney Museum in New York. (Both institutions were queried by ARTnews.) This reminded him, he continued, of “the way that migrating communities were treated” in the United States: “During World War II, when Mexicans were allowed into the country to make up a labor shortage, we were herded through stations, sprayed with DDT [an insecticide used for pest control in farming.]”

“At museums and institutions, these protocols are institutionalized, but we have a practice with a different relationship to these materials and a different way of caring for them,” he said.

Respect is a rarely intuitive concept; it’s a precedent, and the precedent set by the World Fair divorced meaning—people—from the materials of Mesoamerican art. A relevant contrast: Elsewhere at that World Fair, big-name American artists of the time like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Ellsworth Kelly were exhibited in a pavilion commissioned by New York City and designed by Philip Johnson and Richard Foster. It cost an extra ticket to enter the pavilion; the Olmec head cost nothing.

Gift of the Artists 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, a grouping of steel pedestals by Cortez, bear homages to Maya tenons that were “forcibly migrated”, as Cortez described it, from Belize and Honduras by students at Williams College to that Massachusetts school, where the objects remain. The objects on Cortez’s pedestal are 3D-printed replicas, since the college would not loan the artists the originals.

“The museum inherited them and cared for them,” Cortez said, but in the “context of the museum, they are treated as artifacts, not as being sacred” for their respective communities.

Cortez spoke of personally ferrying relics across great distances for scholarship and safety’s sake. Fittingly, her replicas are placed amid work celebrating her adopted home of Los Angeles. These stone are obviously replicas, given their candy-colored palette, and they sit before a video recording of esparza’s Terra Corpo Ranfla: Terra Cruiser 4Evers, in which the artist transformed himself into a lowrider cyborg (in the style of 25-cent pony ride), with participants activating him.  It’s a riotous amalgam of gay cruising, lowrider culture, and Mexica, the self-given name of the Aztecs.

That point feels sharper knowing the context in which this show was installed. The Altadena and the Palisades fires were still burning, and neither artist escaped unscathed. Cortez’s home burned, though her studio was intact.

“You don’t remember that you can’t go home to see what you lost,” she said. “But then you realize: Oh no. You’re looking for something, something someone gave you, and it’s not there. It’s been healing to think about the absence of objects, because my own objects are absent. We are honoring the absence of others here.”

“The only thing that will save us,” she added, “is to keep making our work.”