Art & Art History News - News, November 22, 2023

Monday, November 27, 2023
4:00-5:30 PM in the VAC Auditorium 1B20

rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and currently lives in Los Angeles. Woven into esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, he employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. His recent projects have evolved through experimental collaborative projects grounded in laboring with land vis-à-vis adobe brick-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. 

rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) received a BA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2011). Solo exhibitions have been held at Artists Space, New York (2023); MASS MoCA, North Adams (2019); ArtPace, San Antonio (2018); and Ballroom Marfa (2017). Selected group exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art Tucson (2022); San Diego Art Institute (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2017); and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016). esparza is a recipient of a Pérez Prize (2022), Latinx Artist Fellowship (2021), Lucas Artist Fellowship (2020), Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2017), and Art Matters Foundation Grant (2014). esparza’s work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; San Jose Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

Currently, esparza's work is on view in the MCA Denver exhibition "Cowboy."

Image: Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser performance at Art Basel Miami, 2022. Photo courtesy of Fabián Guerrero