Image
Current Exhibition
Armando Cortés: What Lives Forever
On view November 7, 2026–January 30, 2027 The gallery will be closed November 26–November 28 and December 24–January 2.
The Â鶹ֱ²¥ Art Gallery presents What Lives Forever from artist . The exhibition opens on November 6 with a free public reception on Friday November 6, from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. There will also be an artist talk with Armando Guadalupe Cortés on Thursday, November 12, from 12:15 p.m. to 1:30 p.m.
About the Exhibition
In What Lives Forever, Cortés draws on the folklore of his hometown in Michoacán, family legends, and his own origin story
to explore how we are shaped by memory and myth. At the center of the exhibition is a monumental rebar sculpture in a pyramidal form that functions simultaneously as a ramp and a staircase. Part mountain, part temple, part home improvement project, and part accessibility structure, it draws together disparate influences while gently collapsing distinctions between the monumental and the everyday.
The exhibition emerged in part from Cortés's meditation on the recent deaths of his aunt and uncle. His aunt served as the midwife at his birth, creating a deeply personal connection between beginnings and endings that runs throughout the project. The parallel rituals surrounding their funerals, depicted in side-by-side drawings, underscored how families and communities use ceremony and storytelling to navigate loss and preserve connection across generations.
In the accompanying folklore-inspired performances, staged within the ceremonial space created by the central structure, Cortés activates the installation with ceramic sculptures including boxes filled with bones, contemporary milagros, and topographical forms depicting the mountains of his hometown. Together, these elements explore the porous boundary between life and death, start and finish, and the rituals that connect them.
About the Artist
Image
Armando Cortés is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. Originally from UrequÃo, a small farming community in Michoacán, México, Cortés draws inspiration from everyday aspects of his two vastly different worlds. His practice builds on storytelling, object making, and performance traditions. He merges traditional forms and methods from his native home 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. Drawing from oral history, observation, and personal experience, Cortés explores and blends endurance, and labor into his performance, craft and industry into his sculpture, and history into his material choice.
Through his work 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.