Please join the Department of Art, Art History, and Design on Thursday, November 12 at 4 pm for a special lecture series titled Mutant Salon hosted by Young Joon Kwak,  2020-2021 Artist-in-Residence: Critical Race Studies. The third speaker in this series is artist rafa esparza. This series is free and open to the public.

This event doesn’t require pre-registration, if you are interested in joining our zoom webinar, please join using the following link and password. https://msu.zoom.us/j/97803340342 pw: mutants

rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance 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. Esparza was included in the 2016 Made in LA biennial at the Hammer Museum and the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Other solo exhibitions and performances have been held at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2019); ArtPace, San Antonio, TX (2018); Ballroom Marfa, TX (2017); Performance Space New York Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2018), among others.

For more information about rafa esparza please click on their name below.
rafa esparza