Beatriz Cortez — Temporary Home

Following the devastating wildfires in and around Los Angeles in January 2025, the Galka Scheyer House entered a new chapter as the temporary residence of Beatriz Cortez. Cortez, a Salvadoran-born, Los Angeles–based artist, is known for her interdisciplinary practice spanning sculpture, installation, and drawing. Her work often engages with themes of migration, memory, futurity, and survival, frequently drawing on histories of displacement and imagining alternative temporalities and speculative futures. During her stay, Cortez conceived of the house as a “Temporary Home,” transforming it into both a site of reflection and a space of collective encounter. Until the end of July, the house functioned not only as a place of residence but also as an evolving artistic environment shaped by dialogue, presence, and exchange.

Before her departure, Cortez initiated an exhibition project that invited a group of peers to inhabit the space alongside her—conceptually and physically—in order to engage in a shared conversation with the house and with Galka Scheyer’s legacy. Departing from the house’s historical role as a site for painting and display, the project foregrounded sculpture, allowing the interior to be reimagined through new material and spatial interventions.

In doing so, the exhibition explored the idea of the house as a vessel of layered temporalities: a site where past and present intersect, where histories of exile and refuge resonate with contemporary experiences of precarity and belonging. Emphasizing the generative potential of impermanence, the project celebrated the gifts of temporary homes, the formation of community, and the possibility of time travel—both metaphorical and material—within a space so deeply embedded in the cultural history of Los Angeles.

“Temporary Home” was voted among the the “Best Art Shows Around the World in 2025” by renowned art magazine Hyperallergic.