William Cordova

William Cordova (born 1969, Lima, Peru) is a Peruvian-born interdisciplinary artist and cultural practitioner whose work brings together memory, history, ritual, architecture and material culture. His practice encompasses drawing, sculpture, installation, collage, film and collaborative projects, often incorporating found, reclaimed and ephemeral materials. Through these forms, Cordova examines displacement, cultural transmission and the ways histories are constructed, preserved and transformed. His work frequently brings different cultural and temporal references into contact, challenging linear understandings of history and creating connections between personal experience and broader social, political and cultural narratives. Cordova’s practice is particularly attentive to the relationships between architecture, ritual and spirituality. Drawing on Indigenous and diasporic histories, as well as Afro-Peruvian and Andean cultural references, he investigates how buildings, objects, images and patterns can carry knowledge across generations. His materials often retain visible traces of use and obsolescence, allowing discarded objects and precarious structures to become carriers of historical memory. In works such as *huaca (sacred geometries)*, presented in the Whitney Museum’s 2018 exhibition *Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay*, Cordova addressed the relationship between pre-Columbian architecture and contemporary communities, using the form of scaffolding associated with Huaca Huantille to consider both the original function of the site and the displacement of people who had occupied it. The artist’s work often proceeds through extensive research into symbols, people and connections between cultures, while resisting distinctions between past and present. His first major U.S. museum survey, *william cordova: now’s the time: narratives of southern alchemy*, was presented at Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2018. The exhibition brought together drawings, sculptures, installations and collaborative projects organized around the interconnected ideas of transmission, alchemy and transcendence. PAMM described Cordova’s approach as one that collapses linear concepts of time and history and uses ephemeral and precarious materials to construct connections between architecture, cinema, literature and music. Cordova earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale University. His work has been presented internationally in exhibitions including the 2008 Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1’s *Greater New York* (2010), Prospect.3 New Orleans, the 13th Havana Biennial and the 50th Venice Biennale. His work has also been shown in institutional exhibitions concerned with Indigenous architecture, modernity and cultural histories, including the Whitney Museum’s *Pacha, Llaqta, Wasichay: Indigenous Space, Modern Architecture, New Art*. His work is held in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Walker Art Center and the Museo de Arte de Lima. The Guggenheim collection includes *now’s the time (pachacuti)* and *now’s the time (pacha mama)*, while the Whitney collection contains fifteen works by the artist, including *extended improvisations in time (a.b.)*, *Young Lords (historia en cuatro pisos)* and *La casa que Frank Lloyd Wright hizo para Atahualpa*. Alongside his artistic practice, Cordova has developed curatorial and community-oriented projects including the Florida AIM Biennial and the Tulsa Greenwood Centennial. His recent recognitions include a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2021, a Creative Capital Award in 2024 for *stand up next 2 a mountain*, and a Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant in 2025. The Creative Capital-supported project continues his engagement with architecture, geometry and history as ways of illuminating themes of resistance and collective memory.