Join MOCA for an afternoon with Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio and fellow artist, educator, and cultural critic Beatriz Cortez in conjunction with the exhibition MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio. Through a shared interest on connections between El Salvador and Los Angeles, the two artists delve into themes of migration, memory, and material, as well as social justice, offering intimate and intergenerational perspectives on Latinx experience.
A book signing of the exhibition catalog, the inaugural edition of the Nimoy Emerging Artists Publication Series, will follow the program.
The exhibition marks the relaunch of the celebrated MOCA Focus series, which presents an artist's first solo museum show in Los Angeles and centers on new or discrete bodies of work.
MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio features artworks dating from 2016 to the present and debuts three new large-scale sculptures specially commissioned for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA.
Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio (b. 1990) is a Los Angeles-based artist who combines natural materials such as rubber and amber with found clothing, street detritus, and ephemera to create large-scale sculptural archives of Salvadoran communities in Los Angeles that give form to experiences of diaspora, migration, and solidarity.
Beatriz Cortez is a multidisciplinary artist born in El Salvador and based in Los Angeles and Davis. Her work explores simultaneity, multiple temporalities, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including recent solo exhibitions at Storm King Art Center (2023); Williams College Museum of Art (2023-2024); Commonwealth and Council (2022); Pitzer College Art Galleries (2022); and Craft Contemporary (2019). Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2018 and 2019); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2018); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York (2019); TEOR/éTica, San José, Costa Rica (2019); Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá, Colombia (2019); Henry Art Gallery, Seattle (2019); Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2020); 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA (2020); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Panamá (2021); MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI (2021); Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (2021 and 2016); Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2021), among others. Cortez is the recipient of the Latinx Artist Fellowship (2023), Borderlands Fellowship (2022-24), Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020), and California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists (2016), among many others. Her work is represented in several collections including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Michigan State University Broad Art Museum, East Lansing; El Paso Museum of Art; Ford Foundation, New York, and the Getty Research Institute. Cortez received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and a PhD in Latin American Literature from Arizona State University. She teaches sculpture and contemporary theory at the University of California, Davis.
This program is organized by Justen Leroy, Director of Public Programs and Community Outreach, and Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Major support for MOCA Focus: Eddie Rodolfo Aparicio is provided by Nora McNeely Hurley and Manitou Fund and the MOCA Environmental Council.
Additional support is provided by the Sherman Family Foundation and 
Exhibitions at MOCA are supported by the MOCA Fund for Exhibitions with generous funding provided by Jordan S. Goodman + The Goodman Family Foundation and The Earl and Shirley Greif Foundation.
Publication support is provided by the Nimoy Fund for Emerging Artists.
