rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, working across live performance, sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting. Known for his work with adobe brick, a skill he inherited from his father, Ramón Esparza, his process is a means of connecting the artist to community and centering inclusivity within contexts of historical exclusion.
rafa’s use of adobe can be traced back to his father’s life in Ricardo Flores Magon, Durango, Mexico, where he worked with the material before migrating to the United States in the 1970s. When rafa came out as queer in college, it created an emotional distance and strain in relationships with friends and family, especially with his father. Seeking to overcome that strain, rafa asked Ramón to teach him how to work with adobe. Although their interactions during the adobe-making process were focused on the technical aspects of the craft, working with his father allowed them to gradually mend their relationship and culminated in Ramón Esparza leading the production of rafa’s first large-scale adobe brick installation in 2014.
This origin of medium informs rafa’s current work, where he uses adobe as a platform to “probe a history of institutionalized racism in traditional art spaces”. A collaborative process is central to the work, often involving other BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and Queer artists. By bringing this process into historically exclusive institutions, he explains, the work is designed to “ground conversations that are about inclusivity”.
“Bringing adobe into traditional art spaces, to me, is a way of collapsing modernity and reminding us that all of these buildings are built over land.”
The physical presence of sun-baked earth within the white walls of a gallery is both a physical and a philosophical challenge. Bringing adobe into art institutions often runs counter to institutional requirements for organic materials. Such venues have required the adobe to be sprayed with pesticides or irradiated to kill any living matter. Drawing parallels to the exclusion and sanitization faced by immigrants and marginalized communities, rafa sees these institutional challenges as extensions of long-standing systems of exclusion and control in art spaces and society more broadly.
rafa shares, “Bringing adobe into traditional art spaces to me is a way of collapsing modernity… reminding us that all of these buildings are built over land.” In his 2025 installation, Casi Casa: De Borrado, at MACLA in San Jose, rafa is collaboratively creating a large slab constructed from adobe. The installation is meant to prompt visitors to reflect on heritage, familial legacies, and humanity’s relationship to land. rafa wants audiences to imagine what it would mean to “pause” the relentless drive to build and instead imagine the Earth swallowing up life as we know it.
rafa’s 2025 installation will be featured in the group exhibition From Their Hands to Ours at MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in San Jose. The exhibition (December 2025 – March 2026), presented with Montalvo Arts Center, focuses on how ancestral wisdom and childhood experiences shape identity.
Follow rafa on Instagram at elrafaesparza
Follow MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana on Instagram at macla_sanjose and on the web at maclaarte.org
Follow Montalvo Arts Center on Instagram at montalvoarts and on the web at montalvoarts.org
Follow the Lucas Artists Residency Program on Instagram at lucasartres
rafa esparza was an artist in residence at the Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Residency Program, January 2020 – March 2020 & November 2025 – December 2025
Image 3: Casi Casa: De Borrado, 2025, Adobe floor