b. 1971, Lima

Born in 1971 in Lima, Peru, William Cordova earned a BFA from the Art Institute of Chicago (1996) and an MFA from Yale University, New Haven (2004), and spent a year at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine (2003). Cordova’s practice employs a variety of media to capture a sense of everyday experience and history, found objects, and their complex relationship to one another. Cordova treats found objects as carriers of their own particular memories; by juxtaposing these symbols, his work offers new cross-cultural narratives that resist the traditionally linear understanding of history.

Having lived in Lima, Miami, Chicago, Houston, and New York, Cordova’s practice reflects various modes of cultural flux and changes in perspective experienced during his upbringing. For his sculpture Greatest Hits (para Micaela Bastidas, Tom Wilson y Anna Mae Aquash) (2008), Cordova created a column of 3,000 vinyl records that towers above scattered items such as Peruvian gourds, pennies, a cigar, and a VHS tape. Cordova’s tower can be seen as a kind of musical obelisk, in which each unit contains a specific cultural and historical memory. Essential to this work is an understanding of vinyl as a medium whose distinctive sound was replaced by the clarity of digital recording. Greatest Hits asks its audience to consider the significance of records as projectors of historical sound for a modern audience. In this one’s 4 u (pa’ nosotros) (2010), Cordova plays with the viewer’s perception by forcing one to synthesize incongruous sensory stimuli. Projected behind a wooden viewing structure, the work combines the 35mm slide film of Peter Spirer’s 2002 documentary on rapper 2pac (Tupac Amaru Shakur) with the audio from Federico García Hurtado’s 1984 documentary on Tupac Amaru, the last indigenous Incan monarch in Peru. this one’s 4 u contextualizes seemingly disparate historical narratives into a singular experience that reveals associations and juxtapositions across cultures and time.

Cordova has been an artist in residence at such institutions as The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2004); Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2007); and University of Texas, Dallas (2011). His first solo exhibition took place in 2003 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, and since then his work has been shown in Latin America and Europe, as well, presenting his first solo museum exhibition in Europe at La Conservera, Murcia, Spain (2011). Cordova has participated in many group exhibitions, including those at the Whitney Biennial, New York (2008); Instituto de cultura puertorriqueña, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2009); P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), New York (2010); and Nasher Museum, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina (2010), among others. He has received numerous grants and awards, including those from Art Matters (2009) and Joan Mitchell Foundation (2011). Cordova lives and works in Miami and Houston.