Rafa Esparza’s Staring at the Sun includes a series of paintings – portraitures, landscape, and abstraction – on the surface of adobe bricks. He creates a new space out of the adobe bricks he and his family labored to make – creating a new physically brown space in a white room as a form of reclamation and physical visualization of representation.

“My interest in browning the white cube — by building with adobe bricks, making brown bodies present — is a response to entering traditional art spaces and not seeing myself reflected. This has been the case not just physically, in terms of the whiteness of those spaces, but also in terms of the histories of art they uphold,” Esparza was quoted saying in an interview to ArtForum in November 2017

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