Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field

Esparza uses adobe, a craft he learned from his father, as a vessel for sharing stories. For this project Esparza invited other queer artists to join him as adoberos and make 5,000 bricks. 

“Over the wet scrape and slap of shovels hitting mud and concrete, the artists talked as they worked: about friends’ performance pieces and gallery representation, about queer Chicano dance parties and experimental theater. They talked about taking a trip together to Tijuana to eat tacos and drink tequila, and about the experiences their own family members had crossing the border a generation or more ago” Pacific Standard Magazine. The theme of sharing stories doesn’t stop with the production of the adobe, it extends to the display as well.  

Esparza responded to the traditional white and sterile gallery space with “brown matter.” He and his father took these adobe bricks from Los Angeles to New York and built a gallery space within a gallery of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Inside Esparza’s brown, earthy gallery we see large photographs by Dorian Ulises López Macías, a sculpture made from volcanic rock (cairn) by Beatriz Cortez, a fake artifact from the Southwestern by Gala Porras-Kim, and mural by Eamon Ore Girón. Ramiro Gomez made the gallery into temporary painting studio and Esparza used this space for a performance with Nao Bustamante. Esparza used his platform to amplify more voices because none of those artists were formally invited to show work in the Whitney Biennial. Alicia Inez Guzmán from Southwest Contemporary summed up the exhibit nicely, “the adobe rotunda thus played multiple roles: it was an artwork unto itself, as well as a space for exhibiting the work of others. It was both figure and ground.” 

For more art with themes of necessity and storytelling through craft see Susan Cianciolo, Cauleen Smith, Jessi Reaves, and Raúl de Nieves. Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field is an example of craft as art.