Artist Talk: rafa esparza, Bust: A Meditation on Freedom

Alberto Lule and students from the Underground Scholars Initiative will be in conversation with artist rafa esparza, who had work currently featured in the exhibition Affective Resistance on view in the UAG and Room Gallery until December 16. The exhibition brings together works by eight artists using performance art and materialist abstraction as modes of resistance to systemic racism and state power.

rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores history, kinship, and genealogies disrupted by colonialism through his personal experience. rafa has created numerous site-specific installations and performances, including many involving the labor of adobe brickmaking learned from his father. Bust: A Meditation on Freedom was staged outside of the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, also known as the LA County Jail, with the assistance of several close collaborators and family members. The video is set against the backdrop of two bail bonds shops in a nod to one of the many extractive industries targeting incarcerated people.

Affective Resistance, organized by Professor Liz Glynn and MFA candidate Alberto Lule, draws upon a rich history of student and faculty activism in the UC system, as well as UCI’s Art Department’s historic emphasis on performance art and radical politics. Alberto Lule is an interdisciplinary artist, an alumnus of UCLA’s BFA program, and member of the Underground Scholars Initiative. The UCI Underground Scholars Program creates a pathway for incarcerated, formerly incarcerated and system impacted individuals into higher education.

Underground Scholars Initiative (USI) is the student-run organization that works in partnership with the UCI Underground Scholars Program which is led and run by UCI staff. The exhibition is part of the Poetic Justice Initiative, a programming initiative and cluster hiring program established as part of the University of California, Irvine’s Black Thriving Initiative.

About the Artist:
rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores history, kinship, and genealogies disrupted by colonialism through his personal experience. Rafa has created numerous site-specific and collaborative performances, including many involving the labor of adobe brick-making learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. Leveraging the collective and the communal, esparza’s work challenges binaries and deconstructs hierarchies. Solo exhibitions of esparza’s work have been presented at Artists Space, New York (2023); Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles (2021); MASS MoCA, North Adams (2019); and Ballroom Marfa (2017), among others. https://commonwealthandcouncil.com/us/rafa-esparza/biography

The Affective Resistance exhibition is presented as part of the Poetic Justice Initiative and UCI’s Black Thriving Initiative, and with the generous support of UCI Illuminations and the CTSA Dean’s Fund for Excellence.