Imagine if one day the shiny mountain-like sculpture you were looking at just … left. Migrated. Gone.

UC Davis’s newest faculty member in the Department of Art and Art History, Beatriz Cortez, created such a sculpture in 2023, and called it Ilopango, the Volcano that Left. It takes its name from a famous volcano in present-day El Salvador which also seems to have … left. Ilopango’s cinder cone was blown apart in 536 C.E. during the height of the Mayan civilization. Its ash shot into the atmosphere and has been documented as far away as in the ice records of Antarctica and Greenland in a volume geologists say created a worldwide destruction of crops, a pandemic, starvation, and mass migration. Today, a lake about a quarter of the size of Lake Tahoe fills its caldera and people, including Cortez — a native of El Salvador — have swam in its waters, unaware of its history.

Cortez and her collaborators created Ilopango and its associated pieces in 2023 for her solo exhibition at the Museum Hill at the Storm King Art Center in New York. The sculpture’s polished steel face “bubbles” like lava with stitched fault lines reminding viewers of the seismic activity that took place centuries ago. Ilopango’s accompanying pieces utilize Mayan concepts of holding both the underground and stars as sacred. Stela Z, after Quiriguá (Contrary Warrior) is a stela, which serves a bit like a gravestone for Ilopango. Cosmic Mirror (The Sky over New York) is considered by the artist to be a “hyperobject, meaning a concept or phenomenon beyond human comprehension.” Cosmic Mirror is a metallic boulder field laid out in what Western astrologers would call the constellation Orion.

Envisioned as a sculpture that rises out of the Earth, but is not fixed to it, it was still surprising when Ilopango moved. Where it once sat, only hints of it remained at Museum Hill. Cortez, who herself left El Salvador in 1989 during a civil war, took her volcano on a public journey up the Hudson River on the bow of a ship in November of 2023. She created a welcome event for it at the dock in Troy, New York, almost as if it were emigrating away from its birthplace. It then sat as a celebrated centerpiece at the renowned Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, with a weekend of installation work called “Shifting Center” with sonic works by Pauline Oliveros, Igor de Gandarias and others. 

Cortez said, “[By] installing Ilopango in the middle of the concert hall at the EMPAC I learned about the soundscapes that matter creates, even in silence.” EMPAC is known for having an incredibly low noise floor, which is the ambient noise of a given space, which enables audience members to experience soundscapes in different ways.

Ilopango’s movement makes it a nomadic work of art, almost never at rest. In creating it, Cortez both leaned into the notion of impermanence and explored connections which can span continents. Ilopango’s modern corollaries — the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing global climate and migration crises — are not constricted by borders. 

Cortez said of experiencing her own work, “When removing Ilopango from Storm King I learned about the void that we leave in the places and temporalities where we have been, and I learned that in our absence we continue to have conversations and relationships with others.”

“As I stood on the boat’s platform, while the sculpture migrated over the Hudson River, I was moved by being in a place and in a moment where different temporalities collided, where saltwater and freshwater came together, where the cosmic forces of the moon, the sun, and the Earth impacted these waters with their different densities, creating multiple tides, and where the Mohawk River and the Hudson Rivers swirled together. It felt like a sacred moment, and I felt so fortunate to have experienced it in the company of ‘Ilopango, the Volcano that Left.’”

While it refers to a specific historic event, Ilopango is timeless and futuristic. It ingeniously allows one to grasp the geological time scale and magnify the fragility of the land on which we live upon. Cortez’s piece is also a powerful metaphor for the greatest of humanity’s struggles, from the Mayan Civilization to present-day cultures. Filmmaker Guillermo Escalón has been documenting the volcano’s movements, and along with composer Igor de Gandarias they will collaborate on a forthcoming film.

Cortez’s works have been shown recently at the reopening of the Smithsonian Arts + Industries Building, and by the Frieze Sculpture Program at Rockefeller Center, New York City. Her work has been shown at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, and in important museums and exhibitions in Central America, among others. Recently, she was the Atelier Calder artist in residence in Saché, France — where she began to construct Ilopango — and is the recipient of the Borderlands Fellowship at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics in New York (2022–24).

Cortez came to Davis in 2023 as an associate professor and was previously a visiting professor in The Manetti Shrem California Studio in the Department of Art and Art History at UC Davis, teaching both undergraduate and graduate courses, and giving a guest lecture on her work.

Cortez isn’t ready to say where Ilopango will travel next, but it’s certainly not ready to rest.