Meet Rafa Esparza Inaugural Montalvo Lucas Artists Program/SCU Fellow
Rafa Esparza
Please join the Department of Art and Art History in welcoming Rafa Esparza, our first resident artist and is here for the Winter quarter, 2020. He is the inaugural Montalvo Lucas Artists Program / Santa Clara University Fellow (MLAP/SCU Fellow) in the new collaboration between SCU's Department of Art and Art History and the Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga. He will share his time between SCU and Montalvo; here at SCU he will be producing work, holding open studio hours for students and faculty, and giving an artist's talk (stay tuned for the date!). The residency culminates with an exhibition of his work, which will run from July 6 to October 18 in the Department of Art and Art History (located in the Edward M. Dowd Art and Art History Building).
Rafa will be hosting open studio hours on Fridays, February 21 & 28 and March 6 & 9 from 1:00 pm - 4:00 pm in Dowd 218. Stop by and introduce yourself and get a sneak peek at his upcoming exhibition artwork.
Rafa Esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and currently living in Los Angeles. Woven into Esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narrative, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result. Using live performance as his main mode of inquiry, Esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation as primary tools to interrogate and critique ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the environments where people currently navigate and socialize. Esparza’s recent projects evolve through experimental collaborative projects grounded by laboring with land vis a vis adobe, a labor inherited by his father Ramon Esparza, where the artist shares institutional space and resources with invited Brown and Queer artists and cultural producers. Esparza is invested in working in the local geographies of his hometown and that of the Southwest including Mexico and Latin-America.