Date/Time
Date(s) - 20th May 2023
1:00 pm - 4:00 pm

Location
TOM House

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• Foundation Events

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Tom of Finland Foundation presents an in-person collage art-making workshop with Rubén Esparza.

Materials provided: Base paper, adhesives, utensils, and some image materials
Please bring print material to cut and paste.
Participant will have a finished collage at end of session.

About the artist:

Rubén Esparza is an artist, activist, and independent curator exploring Queer and Latinx histories, existential trauma, and the reconciliation of his heritage, that of the colonizer and the colonized. Using analog materiality alongside complex experimental digital-driven artworks, Esparza creates sociopolitical commentary on and homage to brownness and / or Queerness.

His most recent solo exhibition at Tom of Finland Foundation, Piss + Blood & Spunk in 2019, featured artworks spanning over twenty-five years. Receptions hosted included performances by Sheree Rose, Ridge Gallagher, Oscar David Alvarez, Marval A Rex, Jamison Karon, and others, with exhibitions in Berlin, Chile, Mexico City, and New York.

Esparza’s curatorial work focuses primarily on the LGBT/Queer and POC communities. He is the founder and director of the Queer Biennial anchored in Los Angeles, with satellites in New York, Miami, Mexico, Paris, and Zurich. Plans are underway in realizing the fourth Queer Biennial iteration, postponed from 2020, titled Queer Biennial 4: Arenas:. Esparza’s work is part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collections, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Santa Barbara Museum, Chicago National Museum of Mexican Art, and most recently the Library of Congress.

“Hand-cut and pasted-up porn magazine pages graphically homo-eroticize whimsical adorations of the ribald. These analog collages form the underpinning to his pastiches that employ complex manipulations to create an inventive layering. Coded into these handmade amalgamations is a commentary heralded by a blast of hard-core queer smut from another time; together, they retrieve a culture vanquished by the internet age. Esparza revivifies print porn by creating outrageously sexual erotica that gives homage to a vanished genre of gay civilization.” – Phil Tarley

SEE COMPLETED COLLAGE ART BY RUBÉN ESPARZA

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