Walkthrough: MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia with rafa esparza
MOCA Grand Ave
Saturday, March 29, 2025
3 PM
Free with RSVP

Join artist rafa esparza for a walkthrough of MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia.

In his paintings, Ana Segovia (b. 1991, Mexico City; lives in Mexico City) twists assumptions about masculinity through a queer lens. Working with an aggressive palette of fluorescent colors, daring compositions, and cinematographic framing and cropping, Segovia undermines the gendered basis of national identity built around hypermasculine archetypes—such as the charro or cowboy—that have been standardized by film. The artist, who is a direct descendent of major players in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, an era spanning from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, has been using film stills drawn mostly from this auspicious tradition as a source for his paintings.

In MOCA Focus: Ana Segovia, he continues his engagement with film archives, this time turning to Roger E. Alamos’s I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You (1983). The film, a variation on 1980s musical dramas, recounts a love story between Buck, an aspiring artist, and Mario, an undocumented dreamer working as a ranch hand in a fictional Southwestern town. The exhibition presents three suites of paintings illustrating stills from crucial scenes in the film. Also included are copies of Alamos's script and a mural based on the film's end credits, both of which subtly stage an unexpected plot twist.

rafa esparza (b. 1981, Los Angeles; lives and works in Los Angeles) is a
multidisciplinary artist whose work reveals his interests in history, personal narratives,
and kinship, his own relationship to colonization and the disrupted genealogies that it produces. Using live performance as his main form of inquiry, esparza employs site-specificity, materiality, memory, and what he calls (non)documentation as primary tools to investigate and expose ideologies, power structures, and binary forms of identity that establish narratives, history, and social environments. esparza’s recent projects are grounded in laboring with land and adobe-making, a skill learned from his father, Ramón Esparza. In so doing, the artist invites Brown and Queer cultural producers to realize large-scale collective projects, gathering people together to build networks of support outside of traditional art spaces.

esparza received a BA from University of California, Los Angeles (2011). Solo and two-
person exhibitions have been held at Commonwealth and Council, Mexico City (2024).