Accidental Offerings to Ancient Gods

A palace of fine arts sinks into historical depths in Beatriz Cortez’s exhibition at Commonwealth and Council.

By Will FenstermakerDecember 12, 2025

• Art & Architecture

PRESIDENT PORFIRIO DÍAZ commissioned the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City in 1904 to commemorate the 1810 War of Independence. It was part of an ambitious program of monumental architecture and public works that marked his three-decade dictatorial reign, aimed at modernizing the nation and remaking the capital in the manner of a European metropolis. Opera houses, boulevards, and triumphal statuary were built on the site of the former Lake Texcoco, which had sustained the agriculture of the Mexica people, including traditional works of hydraulic engineering, before it was drained by Spanish conquerors beginning in the 17th century. The Art Nouveau Palacio de Bellas Artes, located atop a forgotten Aztec altar to Quetzalcoatl, was to be the crown jewel in the Porfirian renovation. Designed by the Italian architect Adamo Boari, this theater for performing arts offered an exercise in grandeur and European taste, a counterpoint to Díaz’s vast expropriation of peasant land for Mexican elites and foreign capital.

In a sparse room in the city once called El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula, the artist Beatriz Cortez has reimagined the Palacio de Bellas Artes as an austere maquette. Suspended beneath a skylight by four rebar-like rods, a gridded base upholds a dome and two-barrel vaults made of welded steel—a scaffold stripped of its marble facade. Minimalist and elemental, Cortez’s sculpture reduces the national symbol to a system of supports and load paths, its skeletal logic laid bare by a device that bluntly examines how institutional power is built.

Cortez frames her exhibition 4 Meters at Commonwealth and Council with an epigraph attributed to Netzahualcoyotl, the 15th-century Texcoco poet-king: “Even if made of jade it breaks, even if made of precious metal it cracks, even if made of quetzal feathers it tears. Not forever on Earth: only fleetingly here.” It’s an expression of impermanence that echoes in the succinct title shared by the exhibition and the suspended maquette, a reference to the distance the Palacio has sunk into the soft clay of the drained lake bed in the years since the building’s construction—a slow yet measurable consequence of Mexico City’s development and groundwater extraction. The foundation on which Díaz’s palace sits is literally slipping away.

On the wall nearby, Lake Texcoco (2025) renders the vanished body of water in metallic cartography, its irregular contours outlined in welded seams, its blue and green hues mottled and scorched. As with 4 Meters (2025), the sculpture’s industrial materials belie a beguiling, tactile quality. The seams look like scar tissue or sutures; the welds are knurled into knots. Cortez has described her approach to welding as that of a “seamstress,” weaving together materials resonant with cultural and political significance. In the exhibition’s introductory text, she likens Lake Texcoco to cenotes, underground aquifers believed to be portals to the underworld, where the Maya people made offerings to the gods. In Cortez’s conception, the Palacio de Bellas Artes is one such sacrifice—an accidental oblation to some older spiritual order thought conquered.

Cortez’s body of work is populated by ruins, makeshift shelters, and mechanical contraptions that seem to move between epochs. Born in San Salvador in 1970, the artist came of age during the Salvadoran Civil War. At 18, she fled to the United States, where she trained as a literary critic before earning a PhD in Latin American literature and an MFA at CalArts. Her experience of war and displacement, combined with her studies in literature and theory, informs her interest in how the past, the present, and speculative fictions coexist in an object or place. Earth and Cosmos, a joint exhibition with artist rafa esparza earlier this year at the Americas Society in New York, explored the history of the institution, founded by David Rockefeller as an arts and culture counterpart to the free-market evangelism of the Council of the Americas, which acquired objects extracted from Central America, notably a stunning collection of Olmec heads. Cortez described Altar de Kaqjay (2021), her steel facsimiles of Maya shrines looted from Guatemala, as “forced migrants,” members of a transcontinental and transtemporal diaspora. Ceiba (2023), a sculpture Cortez made in collaboration with artists Phillip Byrne and Tatiana Guerrero, took inspiration from the fifth- or sixth-century eruption of Ilopango in El Salvador, which laid waste to Mayan cities while coating the earth in basalt and ash as far away as Greenland. Adobe brick pedestals made by esparza were packed with seeds and other matter, which scattered throughout the gallery as visitors kicked up dirt, imparting some organic residue in the climate-controlled gallery. These projects share an insistence that geological and cosmological time operate independently of institutional ambition, and that even the most seemingly impervious man-made monuments are subject to the beliefs they seek to displace.

How many institutions across the Americas are perched on similarly unstable ground—fault lines, floodplains, fire-prone hillsides—their promise of perpetual custodianship challenged by the ecologies in which they reside? For a few days in January, it seemed as if the Getty Villa might go the way of the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, which burned to the ground in 2018. Ninety percent of its encyclopedic collection was lost, including an eighth-century sarcophagus of the Egyptian priestess Sha-Amun-en-su and the skull of Luzia, the oldest known remains of a human in the Americas. The Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire did destroy a number of culturally significant sites across Los Angeles, including the Theosophical Library Center (founded by members of the spiritualist movement, whose practitioners included William Butler Yeats and Hilma af Klint) and the personal library of the author Gary Indiana. The Eaton Fire also destroyed Cortez’s home in the city of Altadena.

Out of that crisis came an invitation to live at the Galka Scheyer House, a Hollywood villa designed by Richard Neutra for the German Jewish art dealer who championed the “Blue Four” (Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Alexej von Jawlensky). Scheyer’s home served unofficially as an “airship,” as Cortez described it, for celebrated European émigrés like Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang, who found refuge in the United States after fleeing the Second World War. As the building’s first artist in residence, Cortez revived the spirit of the house’s salons, organizing a recent group exhibition, Temporary Home, and hosting communal meals that activated the modernist masterpiece as a social space. Recalling Le Corbusier’s dictum that “a house is a machine for living in,” Cortez’s project joyfully casts preservation as a human process rather than an architectural one, reaffirming that all displaced—not just European intellectuals—deserve a place to gather and rebuild.

Deftly incorporating an imposing language of steel armatures and welded grids into a sculptural critique of permanence, 4 Meters is Cortez’s latest contribution to a broader debate about what, exactly, institutions owe to the objects and cultures they seek to preserve. Artists like Vik Muniz and Gala Porras-Kim (who also shows at Commonwealth and Council) are part of a growing field interrogating the ethics of cultural patrimony and the authority of museums, particularly those indebted to Enlightenment principles of universalism. Both took an illustrative interest in the case of Luzia, the prehistoric woman whose skull was lost in the Rio de Janeiro fire. Using soot and debris from the museum as pigment, Muniz produced drawings and sculptural reconstructions of destroyed artifacts, including a spectral rendering of Luzia’s head. When Porras-Kim learned that the museum intended to reconstruct the skull, she wrote a letter to the museum’s director in which she proposed that the surviving remains be incinerated, because “these efforts are done to prevent the current physical deterioration of ‘Luzia’ as an object and not prioritizing what her wishes for her afterlife might have been.” While Muniz sees ash as a poignant medium through which damaged artifacts of cultural memory can continue to circulate, Porras-Kim argues that the museum’s stewardship propagates an ongoing kind of violence, one that conscripts a young woman’s body into national and scientific narratives long after her death.

Porfirio Díaz lies interred in Paris, where he died in exile, despite the attempts of Mexican conservatives to repatriate his corpse, while his palace slowly sinks down into the earth. Another forced migrant: The architect of a modernized Mexico and a nationalist leader separated from the land of his birth. Cortez’s 4 Meters navigates this complex territory of displacement, blending Muniz’s impulse toward reconstitution and Porras-Kim’s insistence on the continuation of life after dispossession.

Across Cortez’s work, altars, ruins, dust, and monuments appear less as damaged remnants than as diasporic subjects—migrants, not relics—whose temporal and geographic dislocation comprises a condition of production rather than stasis. The question she leaves for us is not about the nature of collections or the politics of the time-bound objects within them, but rather how we might learn to register the belief systems and cosmologies they were built to eclipse. Only then can we begin to understand what it truly means to offer something to a world that will outlast us.

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Featured image: Beatriz Cortez. Lake Texcoco, 2025. Steel, patina. Approx. 49 x 47 x 2 inches. Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles.