About The Art Piece

Tierra. Justicia. Libertad. is an adobe tile made to the dimensions of a letter-size sheet of paper (8.5” x 11”) with a portrait of Ricardo Flores Magon pressed into it along with the phrase, “Tierra, Justicia, y Libertad.” surrounding him. Ricardo Flores Magon was a Mexican anarchist writer who co-founded Regeneración, a newspaper broadly published transnationally throughout Mexico and the U.S.A. The newspaper was widely read and inspired other revolutionary publications such as the Mexican feminist newspaper Vesper, whose motto was Justicia y Libertad. Though Magon himself did not fight or take on a leadership role in the Mexican Revolution, his writing is credited as priming Mexico for revolution. Emiliano Zapata’s war chant “Tierra y Libertad” was coined by Magon and printed in Regeneration before the revolution began. esparza gathers Magon’s image and a phrase that rings true today in the face of the violent privatization and forced displacement of people from their lands around the world.

About The Artist

rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist who was born, raised, and is currently living in Los Angeles. 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. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and (non)documentation as primary tools to interrogate and critique 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, including AIDS Project Los Angeles, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Human Resources, SOMArts, Vincent Price Museum, LACE, and various public sites throughout Los Angeles. He is a recipient of an Emerging Artist 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Arts, a 2014 Art Matters grantee, and a 2015 recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. esparza was recently part of the 2016 Made in L.A. Biennial at the Hammer Museum and the 2017 Whitney Biennial.