Something I couldn't stop thinking about from my conversation with rafa esparza is that art is truly healing. Sometimes it's hard to evaluate and measure the impact. There is no real data on the visualization of artworks, no analytics to decipher or figures to calculate that explain or reason significance. Art is entirely about how it makes people feel-or, at least, it should be. All of the other numbers we attach to it-price lists and auctions, acquisitions and exhibitions-are only indicators of the fact that it made someone, somewhere, feel something. Esparza's art feels like the essence of this notion. Before anything else, his sense of feeling is what drives his practice. It is why he has numerous group exhibitions-to share in the delight of art making with others. It is why his artworks are often a collaborative process that brings in his community of family and friends. It is why his practice explores themes like loss and love, power and pride-some of the most vigorous concepts that imbue immense emotion. Often, as esparza went on to share with me, these conversations start with a sense of generosity. And to be particularly clear, generosity is different from kindness. It is not just being considerate of feelings that does the healing, but the extension thereof. What is good for one may not be good for all. But what is good for all is always good. And that is a hella good feeling.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/7611117177.jpg]
Shaquille Heath: I always like to hear artists talk about their work in their own words. May I ask that of you?
rafa esparza: Sure! I work across different mediums and modes. predominantly performance, sculpture and painting. But I guess my work is very grounded in conversations that deal with histories of colonial violence and all of the resulting genealogies. So, considering the present, myself, and the spaces that I frequent as a direct outcome to these histories that precede us.
I came into contemporary art making through performance art, using my body as a vehicle to produce experiences that could be viewed by communities that informed my work. I seek to allow the work to exist outside of traditional art spaces like museums and galleries and white cubes, in favor of alleyways, public parks, and sidewalks, literally in the places that I feel need to be seen and are important to those communities
But I also have a strong relationship to tactile processes. Materiality is also an important aspect of how I consider what to make. Whether it’s building a concrete column that I’m going to break away from or thousands of bricks that are going to create this adobe rotunda that I invite other artists to participate in, material is an important interest of mine that really helps me materialize some ideas. I’d say adobe is a specific material that’s really at the forefront of what I’ve been making within the last 10 years. It’s a mud-building material indigenous to this continent and to many arid areas around the globe. My father was an adobe brick maker in Mexico before he came up to the States, and I inherited this way of working with mud through him. And yeah, that practice has evolved from literally building blocks that were used to build brown spaces in traditional art spaces to help platform the works of some of my peers and good friends. That material has now evolved into a more intimate practice of painting, and so I’ve been bringing that material to the studio to literally build up surfaces that could be my canvas to paint portraits.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/6117717717.jpg]
The adobe brick making that you inherited from your father—was that something that you learned through watching him, or was that something you asked him to teach you?
When I think about inheritance, I think there are these passive ways of inheriting things that we probably don’t have so much say in or can’t help but learn. But I was very active in inheriting this. I asked my father to teach me how to make bricks, and it was a way for me to kind of reconnect and rekindle a friendship with him after having had a severed relationship due to me coming out to my family and my community. It was kind of a way to bridge that gap. So he taught me back in 2008, when I was still an art student at UCLA. It was a very intimate and personal ask for me. I wasn’t really thinking about using it to make art. I just knew that adobe had a special place in his own personal history, and I thought it could be a good way to start having conversations about some guidance that I needed at the time as a young person coming into adulthood. What it did, in fact, was allow us to share space without being at each other’s necks, while he passed down this way of working with land.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/7177677111.jpg]
Did your father, your family and community support your journey to become an artist?
They have actually always been supportive of that. From very early on. I credit and appreciate all of the creativity that women in my family held, specifically in the kitchen when we’re preparing for any kind of celebration, whether it was a birthday party, a baptism, a wedding, or a quinceaera. There’s always tons of materials, hot glue, and a lot of craft supplies that the woman in my family would use to create keepsakes for people who would attend these parties. And so from very early on, this relationship to making, whether it was through more formal art activities like drawing and painting or to what I consider craft and sculpture, was always something that was really present in my family. They were very informal, maybe outsider kinds of ways, but forms that a bona fide art community might not consider art.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/6761766671.jpg]
I love the idea of you going back to your father, utilizing this activity that he already supported in you, and creating something together. What did he think of the final project when he saw it?
I grew up in East Pasadena, and he still lives in the childhood home where I grew up. In retrospect, it was very special to be in his home making these building blocks that, when he was a teenager, were used to build houses. This is a very common practice in Mexico, where he comes from. In that afternoon, I think we didn’t really speak at all outside of the task at hand, like him literally telling me what the ingredients are in this recipe that he learned from his elders in Mexico. But I did see it as a first step in mending our friendship. Fast forward to 2014, and I asked him to lead the production of enough adobe bricks that would be used for a massive outdoor sculpture. We made, like, 1,400 adobe bricks using water from the LA River, and they were all sunbaked. We worked during the summer. And I think in those moments were all of the questions and conversations that I was hoping to have in 2008, just very candidly coming up in conversation when we were working. My father’s since become an integral part of a lot of these adobe constructions, whether they were massive scale installations or here in LA.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/7171771711.jpg]
I also come from a family where we don't necessarily experience things, process them, and then talk about them. They don't happen in that order. And sometimes a response or reflection on an experience takes years. And so in 2017, I was invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial, and I invited my father to be there to install the adobe installation that we built. That was a very important moment in our relationship and our friendship, though by then we were already really great friends. But I think it was the first time that I heard him vocalize his astonishment for material that has arrived to me, to my practice, and to this country via his immigrant labor-and now seeing it in one of the most important museums of art in the country. It was something just hearing him vocalize, saying that he never believed he would ever see these bricks take form in his life again, and in this manner. It was also important for him to be witness to not only the physical labor of building this kind of installation, but that I had invited a whole cohort of brown artists from Los Angeles to participate in the biennial with me with their own works. So witnessing us literally build up this discursive space and be speaking to one another and each other's works.
And then there was also speaking with curators and art handlers, the team at the Whitney, and various journalists that were coming in to learn about the installation. He got to witness for the very first time a labor that, in his mind, was always very abstract. He always said, "I don't understand how art is work" and "How do you make a living from this?" Education wasn't even something that my family prioritized in our upbringing. Labor and work were, and continue to be, very valued things. So that completely transformed his relationship to my artmaking. There was an intimate level of understanding and a new gained sense of respect for not only the artwork but, I think, also for his own labor, right? Being able to value these bricks beyond a means of survival.
There is definitely a lot of physicality in your work, and that's really beautiful, whether, as you say, it's building these bricks by hand or even being the performance artist that you are. Going back to what you're saying about immigrant labor (though I guess all artists work with their hands?), you can really feel that and the intentionality in your work.
Firstly, I really appreciate that those things feel palpable to you. Yes, there are things that I feel are important to be very explicit about. It's important in the way that I learn and build relationships with things by being in close proximity to the materials, places, and people. It's why I am such a tactile based maker. I need to be directly involved with materials, images, people, and places, but often these are just born out of experiments. Sometimes these works that happen once are left, and then they resurface through memory. So having had the experience of dedicating 10 years of my practice to performance art requires being able to be responsive and open to improvising.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/DtVNNCxEY1716210043492.jpg]
When I'm working in performance, I don't prioritize documenting the performance through video or photo. For me, prioritizing the live audience is the focus of the work. You're creating an experience that people are immersed in, and you have only your memory to go back to that moment to describe it, t...
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/7611117177.jpg]
Shaquille Heath: I always like to hear artists talk about their work in their own words. May I ask that of you?
rafa esparza: Sure! I work across different mediums and modes. predominantly performance, sculpture and painting. But I guess my work is very grounded in conversations that deal with histories of colonial violence and all of the resulting genealogies. So, considering the present, myself, and the spaces that I frequent as a direct outcome to these histories that precede us.
I came into contemporary art making through performance art, using my body as a vehicle to produce experiences that could be viewed by communities that informed my work. I seek to allow the work to exist outside of traditional art spaces like museums and galleries and white cubes, in favor of alleyways, public parks, and sidewalks, literally in the places that I feel need to be seen and are important to those communities
But I also have a strong relationship to tactile processes. Materiality is also an important aspect of how I consider what to make. Whether it’s building a concrete column that I’m going to break away from or thousands of bricks that are going to create this adobe rotunda that I invite other artists to participate in, material is an important interest of mine that really helps me materialize some ideas. I’d say adobe is a specific material that’s really at the forefront of what I’ve been making within the last 10 years. It’s a mud-building material indigenous to this continent and to many arid areas around the globe. My father was an adobe brick maker in Mexico before he came up to the States, and I inherited this way of working with mud through him. And yeah, that practice has evolved from literally building blocks that were used to build brown spaces in traditional art spaces to help platform the works of some of my peers and good friends. That material has now evolved into a more intimate practice of painting, and so I’ve been bringing that material to the studio to literally build up surfaces that could be my canvas to paint portraits.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/6117717717.jpg]
The adobe brick making that you inherited from your father—was that something that you learned through watching him, or was that something you asked him to teach you?
When I think about inheritance, I think there are these passive ways of inheriting things that we probably don’t have so much say in or can’t help but learn. But I was very active in inheriting this. I asked my father to teach me how to make bricks, and it was a way for me to kind of reconnect and rekindle a friendship with him after having had a severed relationship due to me coming out to my family and my community. It was kind of a way to bridge that gap. So he taught me back in 2008, when I was still an art student at UCLA. It was a very intimate and personal ask for me. I wasn’t really thinking about using it to make art. I just knew that adobe had a special place in his own personal history, and I thought it could be a good way to start having conversations about some guidance that I needed at the time as a young person coming into adulthood. What it did, in fact, was allow us to share space without being at each other’s necks, while he passed down this way of working with land.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/7177677111.jpg]
Did your father, your family and community support your journey to become an artist?
They have actually always been supportive of that. From very early on. I credit and appreciate all of the creativity that women in my family held, specifically in the kitchen when we’re preparing for any kind of celebration, whether it was a birthday party, a baptism, a wedding, or a quinceaera. There’s always tons of materials, hot glue, and a lot of craft supplies that the woman in my family would use to create keepsakes for people who would attend these parties. And so from very early on, this relationship to making, whether it was through more formal art activities like drawing and painting or to what I consider craft and sculpture, was always something that was really present in my family. They were very informal, maybe outsider kinds of ways, but forms that a bona fide art community might not consider art.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/6761766671.jpg]
I love the idea of you going back to your father, utilizing this activity that he already supported in you, and creating something together. What did he think of the final project when he saw it?
I grew up in East Pasadena, and he still lives in the childhood home where I grew up. In retrospect, it was very special to be in his home making these building blocks that, when he was a teenager, were used to build houses. This is a very common practice in Mexico, where he comes from. In that afternoon, I think we didn’t really speak at all outside of the task at hand, like him literally telling me what the ingredients are in this recipe that he learned from his elders in Mexico. But I did see it as a first step in mending our friendship. Fast forward to 2014, and I asked him to lead the production of enough adobe bricks that would be used for a massive outdoor sculpture. We made, like, 1,400 adobe bricks using water from the LA River, and they were all sunbaked. We worked during the summer. And I think in those moments were all of the questions and conversations that I was hoping to have in 2008, just very candidly coming up in conversation when we were working. My father’s since become an integral part of a lot of these adobe constructions, whether they were massive scale installations or here in LA.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/7171771711.jpg]
I also come from a family where we don't necessarily experience things, process them, and then talk about them. They don't happen in that order. And sometimes a response or reflection on an experience takes years. And so in 2017, I was invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial, and I invited my father to be there to install the adobe installation that we built. That was a very important moment in our relationship and our friendship, though by then we were already really great friends. But I think it was the first time that I heard him vocalize his astonishment for material that has arrived to me, to my practice, and to this country via his immigrant labor-and now seeing it in one of the most important museums of art in the country. It was something just hearing him vocalize, saying that he never believed he would ever see these bricks take form in his life again, and in this manner. It was also important for him to be witness to not only the physical labor of building this kind of installation, but that I had invited a whole cohort of brown artists from Los Angeles to participate in the biennial with me with their own works. So witnessing us literally build up this discursive space and be speaking to one another and each other's works.
And then there was also speaking with curators and art handlers, the team at the Whitney, and various journalists that were coming in to learn about the installation. He got to witness for the very first time a labor that, in his mind, was always very abstract. He always said, "I don't understand how art is work" and "How do you make a living from this?" Education wasn't even something that my family prioritized in our upbringing. Labor and work were, and continue to be, very valued things. So that completely transformed his relationship to my artmaking. There was an intimate level of understanding and a new gained sense of respect for not only the artwork but, I think, also for his own labor, right? Being able to value these bricks beyond a means of survival.
There is definitely a lot of physicality in your work, and that's really beautiful, whether, as you say, it's building these bricks by hand or even being the performance artist that you are. Going back to what you're saying about immigrant labor (though I guess all artists work with their hands?), you can really feel that and the intentionality in your work.
Firstly, I really appreciate that those things feel palpable to you. Yes, there are things that I feel are important to be very explicit about. It's important in the way that I learn and build relationships with things by being in close proximity to the materials, places, and people. It's why I am such a tactile based maker. I need to be directly involved with materials, images, people, and places, but often these are just born out of experiments. Sometimes these works that happen once are left, and then they resurface through memory. So having had the experience of dedicating 10 years of my practice to performance art requires being able to be responsive and open to improvising.
[https://cdn.magzter.com/1369171671/1715886556/articles/XW85AKfoS1716209763540/DtVNNCxEY1716210043492.jpg]
When I'm working in performance, I don't prioritize documenting the performance through video or photo. For me, prioritizing the live audience is the focus of the work. You're creating an experience that people are immersed in, and you have only your memory to go back to that moment to describe it, t...
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Juxtapoz (Digital) - 1 Issue, Summer 2024