Art & Art History News - November 7, 2023

Monday, November 13, 2023
4:00-5:00 PM in the VAC Auditorium 1B20

Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika) is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Los Angeles. Her work deconstructs technology with material interventions, creating new narratives for hybrid objects that function between human/nonhuman, ancient/future, handmade/autonomous, and beyond power structures rooted in colonialism. They collapse binaries and borders, creating new epistemologies between Earth and Space.

She is an Assistant Professor of Art at UC Santa Barbara in Computational Craft and Haptic Media. She was recently given the Creative Capital Award, the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, the Marciano Art Foundation Artadia Award, the Steve Wilson Award from Leonardo, the International Society for Art, Sciences, and Technology, the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Art Prize, and the Craft Futures Grant from Center for Craft. She has exhibited at LACMA, MCASB, Clockshop, Frieze LA, and Blum & Poe Gallery. She has an upcoming solo museum exhibition with the Columbus Museum of Art. Her work is in the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Tuesday, November 14, 4:30 pm
Norlin Library, Center for British & Irish Studies (room M549)
1157 18th Street, Boulder, CO 80309

Artistry Reconceived (or, How to Do Art History with Your Hands)

Robert Bailey is an Associate Professor of Art History in the School of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Art & Language International: Conceptual Art between Art Worlds (Duke, 2016), and he edited and introduced Terry Smith’s One and Five Ideas: On Conceptual Art and Conceptualism (Duke, 2017).

Monday, November 27, 2023
4:00-5:00 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.

Image from "Cowboy" 2023. An exhibition currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. Photo: Wes Magyar