rafa esparza is a Los Angeles–based multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, as well as his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performances as his main form of inquiry, esparza 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. esparza’s recent projects are grounded in laboring with land and adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist invites Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects, gathering people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces.

The UCLA Department of Art’s visiting lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the William D. Feldman Family Endowed Art Lecture Fund.