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Rafa Esparza (born in 1981) is an American artist who lives in Los Angeles. His work often takes the form of physically exhaustive performances and installations constructed out of adobe bricks. Esparza also frequently works with collaborators, including members of his family. Esparza has exhibited in several public parks, nightclubs, sidewalks, galleries, and museums in Los Angeles and internationally.

Early life and Education
Esparza was born and raised in Pasadena, California and is the son of Mexican immigrants from Durango, Mexico. His father Ramón Esparza had worked in construction for over 30 years and use to make adobe bricks back in Mexico. Later on his father would teach him how to make adobe brick as a way to reconcile their relationship after Esparza came out as queer.

Esparza grew up interested in art but it was not until he attended East Los Angeles College, during his early twenties, that he began to focus on performance art. There he was introduced to installation and performance art through a Latino art collective known as Asco. His interests in performance art were greater solidified when he attended UCLA, where he would mark the campus with different art pieces. He graduated UCLA with a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts.

Work and Career
Esparza's work reflects various themes such a politics, the environment, ethnicity and gender studies. Inspired by his personal life, some of his work reflects issues within Chicano and queer histories like colonization, male sexuality, freedom, home and family. Often times attempting to critique social and racial issues within mainstream art and society by using his art as a way of "browning the white cube", and embodying working immigrant labor and bodies that pushed pass the narratives of traditional art spaces. Esparza’s projects typically involve collaborative projects about laboring and land especially in his use of adobe brick-making. In effort to gather people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces.

Esparza's Staring at the sun was an solo exhibition at MASS MoCA'a gallery, were he covered the white gallery space with adobe bricks and features a series of new paintings on the surface of the adobe, which will include portraiture, landscape, and abstraction. In effort to represent a brown space and create and narrative on the importance of land.

Esparza performed in Dorian Wood's "O" video. In August 2013, Esparza and Wood performed "CONFUSION IS SEX #3" at the Sepulveda Wildlife Basin. The piece was the third installment of a performance art series organized by Dawn Kasper, Oscar Santos, and Dino Dinco.

For his participation in the 2016 Made in LA Biennial at the Hammer Museum Esparza created "Tierra," a field of adobe bricks created from the dirt from Los Angeles. The artist's sculptures and objects were buried and unearthed in Elysian Park a historical site of displacement of early Latinx communities, Palo Verde, La Loma, and Bushop awhile creating the bricks were exhibited on the expanse of adobe bricks.

Esparza was awarded several grants, in 2014 he received the Art Matters grant and a California Community Fund Artist Fellowship. In 2015 Esparza was the recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. Esparza was included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial. For the exhibition he created "Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field"; a gallery made of adobe bricks inside the museum. The adobe room, which was made with dirt from Los Angeles River, was used as an exhibition space by other LA-based Latino artists that Esparza invited to participate. In 2018 Esparza's collaborative exhibition and performance event de la calle was his first solo museum presentation. It took place in the Fashion district of downtown Los Angeles. Santee Alley, that worked to connect the outdoors and museums exhibits. It serves as a site for exhibition, production, and collaboration, were selected local artists and nightlife personalities work use the street of the downtown to produce works to display at the museum. This exhibit meant to portray Esparza's theme of "browning the white cube" and shares narratives of marginalized groups and while also showing the relationship of art and the streets.