About

Armando Guadalupe Cortés is an artist living and working in the industrial city of Wilmington, California. Originally from Urequío, a small farming community in Michoacán, México, Cortés draws inspiration from every aspects of his two vastly different worlds.

Cortés’ practice builds on storytelling, object making, and performance traditions. He merges traditional forms and methods from his native México with broader Latin American literary traditions, and contrasts and hybridizes them with elements of his life in the United States.

In his work—ranging from small-scale sculpture to sculpture-based endurance performance—Cortés interweaves influences from his life in a metropolis and a rural farming society. Endurance and repetitive labor are central in his work. They reflect an affinity for the traditional work of hisfamily and the labor of immigrants in this country. These modes of labor parallel and intersect with his own work as an artist. Cortés’ sculptures are inspired by oral history, observation, and personal experience. His performances are often a literal walk in another’s shoes, a relating of the everyday struggle in his various worlds.

Clay, fired and unfired, is a medium full of history, metaphor, and possibility. Historically, it has allowed for life, for possibility, for home. Currently, Cortés uses it to draw parallels and contrasts, to create hybrids that re-examine historical time, place, and movement. From stoneware nopales covered in golden skin, fire atop them, to raw clay equal his body in weight and drawn by his body, to unfired adobe structures that engulf the institutional space, his work’s aim is an ongoing one.

Through his practice, Cortés strives to propel and make believable narratives often overlooked. This propagation of story takes the form of myth building. This myth-making challenges notions of spectacle and viewership while raising the question of myth as antonym to history. In questioning this dichotomy, Cortés seeks to upend the idea of myth and lore as fiction.