Professor Beatriz Cortez’s sculpture Ilopango, Stela A (2022) has been included in an upcoming groundbreaking exhibition at LACMA. The exhibition, titled Grounded, will open Sept.14. 

Grounded is a multi-media exhibition that invites visitors to contemplate land not just as terrain, but as a foundation for exploring history, ecology, sovereignty, memory, and home. Through 40 works by 35 artists based across the Americas and the Pacific, the exhibition illuminates how human experience is embedded in the land. Artists consider the lasting effects of colonialism and imperialism; share stories of forced migration and displacement; engage with Indigenous mythologies and motifs; and retell ancestral histories by forging new aesthetic languages. 

In Ilopongo, Stela A, part of the MAC3 collection, Professor Cortez examines one of the largest volcanic eruptions on Earth in presentday El Salvador, in 431 CE. She probes the significance of the eruption happening contemporaneously with the collapse of the Roman Empire, the subsequent cooling of the Earth, and the movement of the Maya who were displaced by the eruption, echoing the artist’s own migration centuries later amid the violence of the Salvadoran Civil War in 1989. Cortez made the work of steel by hand in the form of a Maya stela. Her hammering and welding marks create fissures that evoke a geologic formation. The work questions what it means for a work of sculpture to be time-based and how natural events have altered the course of history.  

Additional artists inclide former California Studio residents Tania Candiani and Clarissa Tossin.

Grounded is on view from Sept 14, 2025–Jun 21, 2026.