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Welcoming “Ilopango, the Volcano that Left:” Community Celebration
October 29, 2023 @ 3:00 pm
Join us to honor the passing of Ilopango, the Volcano that Left and celebrate creative place-making along the Mahicannituck (Hudson River)! This community gathering is for all people who love the Sanctuary, who love art and creative placemaking, and who love the Hudson River! This celebration marks the moment that the monumental sculpture Ilopango, the Volcano that Left by Beatriz Cortez, onboard the John J. Harvey fireboat, passes through Troy’s Federal Lock and Dam along the Mahicannituck at the Northern tip of the Hudson River Estuary, just a block away from the Sanctuary’s campus.
As part of our year long Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail project, we honor Beatriz Cortez’s Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, speak with the curators about Cortez’s project and Shifting Center Exhibition at EMPAC, and walk together on the Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail to celebrate creative placemaking on the Hudson in Troy!
More about the Celebration activities
Please register if you wish to attend the Troy reception. We will meet at The Sanctuary by 3PM Sunday for informal introductions the curators, live broadcast from the boat, conversation and light refreshments from the Mediterranean Grill.
Early arrival is recommended. We will then go together by land to the bank of the Hudson River near the Federal Lock and Dam (at the West end of Glen St. outside the Federal Lock Gate) to view the sculpture’s arrival. The sculpture is expected at the lock at approximately 3:45PM. We will then return to the Sanctuary, to watch the live broadcast as Ilopango, the Volcano that Left onboard the John J. Harvey fireboat journeys to Lock 2 at the Waterford Pier. And feel free to join us as curators and community make a short drive to the Waterford Harbor Visitor Center to welcome Beatriz Cortez and the filmmakers personally!
About Beatriz Cortez
Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA in Art from the California Institute of the Arts and a Ph.D. in Literature and Cultural Studies from Arizona State University. Cortez’s work explores simultaneity, life in different temporalities and different versions of modernity, particularly in relation to memory and loss in the aftermath of war and the experience of migration, and in relation to imagining possible futures.
About Ilopango, the Volcano that Left
Join in dialogue with curators Vic Brooks, Nida Ghouse and Eric Booker, as well as Kathryn TeBordo, Catherine Abbott and Katherine Adams from EMPAC, to learn about Ilopango, the Volacno that Left and the Shifting Center Exhibition.
What does it mean to recognize that sculptures, like continents and mountains, are on the move? Beatriz Cortez’s sculpture Ilopango, the Volcano that Left departs Storm King Art Center, the site of its current exhibition, to embark on a three-day performative journey along the Hudson River to EMPAC–Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center. Aboard the John J. Harvey fireboat, the steel volcano travels north up the tidal estuary via Kingston to Troy to be installed in a concert hall for its second site of exhibition, leaving behind a sculptural footprint in its wake: an absence amidst other artworks on Museum Hill.
The volcano can be witnessed as it sails upriver from various viewing points on both shores and online through a livestream. The public is also invited to visit when it docks for the night at the Hudson River Maritime Museum in Kingston and to gather in welcoming the volcano when it passes through the Federal Lock and Dam near The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy. A month prior to the journey, for the Parsons Fine Art Visiting Artists Lecture co-organized by the Vera List Center at the New School, Cortez will chart the conceptual content borne by notions of movement and impermanence.
In making this passage from a sculpture park to a performing arts center, Ilopango, the Volcano that Left proposes a line of questioning: What does it mean to consider sculpture as time-based? And can it become a performance? In (re)enacting a refusal to remain an object transfixed in a landscape, it exposes the fact that sculptures always already carry time, and are the ultimate records of their own making. When we encounter a sculpture as an artwork in an exhibition space, how might we apprehend the histories, geographies, and processes that are latent within it?
Its journey to EMPAC will be broadcast live by the presenting partners October 27 & 29. Filmmaker Guillermo Escalón and composer Igor de Gandarias will join the sculpture on its journey, recording the volcano’s passage for a forthcoming film (2024).
More about the Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail
The Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail is dedicated to celebrating the sacred Mohican soils we are honored to tend. We are beneficiaries of millennia of human history unfolding in a majestic river valley, where the land has been nurtured by Indigenous hands and traumatized through industrial development and systemic inequity.
The Sanctuary Eco-Art Trail embeds art, culture, history, and ecology into an urban nature walk on 6th Avenue in North Troy, weaving a journey from Glen Avenue to 101st Street and Freedom Square on settler lands, just a block away from the Mahicannituck.
The Stockbridge-Munsee Tribe are in partnership on this project, which features Stockbridge-Munsee as well as other Indigenous artists and musicians, historians and storytellers, eco-artists, and muralists, connecting Indigenous wisdom to visions for a future of healing and reparations.
Visitors will engage with stories of environmental justice, ecological restoration, and the living legacy of Indigenous presence on these lands through sculptures, gardens, multimedia, murals, and live events and workshops. Take a look at our Upcoming Events page to learn about upcoming events, workshops, and talks featuring the Eco-Art Trail.
We are committed to lowering the barriers to access for events at The Sanctuary for Independent Media. For people who are hard of hearing or deaf, blind or low-vision, or whose physical limitations can interfere with a satisfying experience, let us know two weeks in advance so we can make appropriate arrangements.
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