Admission is free. Visits by appointment only. To RSVP please email eastlossauna@gmail.com.
Outfest Platinum heads east, where artist Rafa Esparza will exact a site specific performance, reclaiming the location of a former men’s bathhouse, part of a chain named Glen’s Turkish Baths. Despite East Los Angeles’ queer history made visible through artists such as Robert Legorreta / Cyclona, the late Mundo Meza, and Gronk, queerness remains mostly obscure and invisible in mainstream representations of ELA.
This participatory intervention is co-sponsored by ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives and Native Strategies.
Bio
Rafa Esparza was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. Esparza is a multidisciplinary artist. His work ranges in medium from installation, sculpture to drawing, painting; and most predominantly live performance. Woven into Esparza’s bodies of work are his interests in history, personal narratives, and kinship. He is inspired by his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that come forth as a result of. Esparza is persistent in staging situations where he attempts to experience a time and space inaccessible to him. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry; site specificity, materiality, memory and (non)documentation are primary tools in interrogating, critiquing and examining ideologies, power structures and binaries that problematize the “survival” process of historicized narratives and the environments wherein people are left to navigate and socialize. Esparza has performed in a variety of spaces ranging from community engaged places such as AIDS Project Los Angeles, to galleries including Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Human Resources, SOMArts and most recently public sites through out the city of L.A. More information here.