Resident Artist Teaches Adobe Brick-Making
Rafa Esparza '11 (B.A., Art)
L.A. native and visual artist Rafa Esparza is this year’s Wanlass Artist in Residence at Occidental College. The title of his residency is “Manos de Obra (Rituals in Land),” and he will be teaching students how to craft adobe bricks to be used in a campus installation.
'“Manos de Obra is a conversation about local cultural production that spans disciplines, practices and modes that include art-making, collective labor, organizing, activism and protest,” Esparza says. “I’m interested in sharing with students work that is being produced locally that is shaping culture in Los Angeles in distinct ways. I’m particularly interested in how different makers are thinking about bodies within their respective work and how they engage their own bodies, that of their collaborators in some instances, audiences and their communities; and how their work can also be generative in the classroom as knowledge and modes of production.”
Over the course of the semester, in collaboration with art history and the visual arts professor Mary Beth Heffernan’s class Art as Resistance, and with the help of Facilities staff, students will gather ingredients, prepare them, use them to mix adobe and shape them into bricks. They will use “the process taught to me by my father Ramon Esparza, who learned the technique as a young teenage brick-maker in Mexico before migrating up to the States,” Esparza says." — Samantha B. Bonar, Oct. 4
Read the full article at the Occidental College Newsroom website.