Artist Rafa Esparza leads a quirky fashion exhibition through Santee Alley, ground zero of downtown’s garment district A surreal parade
BY CAROLINA A. MIRANDA >>> If you happened to be wandering through the crowded sidewalks around the ar-cades of Santee Alley on a recent Saturday, you may have encountered a most unusual procession in the heart of downtown L.A.’s fashion district. There was a woman in a blue ball gown accompanied by a pack of demons in shades of cobalt blue. Two red devils appeared in three-quarter-length gloves and chiffon skirts. Then there was the slow-moving performer who swayed gently through arcades, decked out in yellow dish gloves and a ball gown crafted from industrial mop heads, cleaning the f loor as he went.
The spectacle was led by Los Angeles artist Rafa Esparza — who was decked out in a noisy necklace of mechanical toy dogs for the occasion — and who is the subject of an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles. The show, “de la Calle,” meaning “of the street,” is as much about bringing elements of the outdoors into the museum — say, a f loor covered in a slab of cracked adobe — as it is about taking some of the museum’s contents into the surrounding streets of downtown Los Angeles. Hence the Santee Alley performance — titled “a la calle,” or “to the street” — a guerrilla affair whose time and location was disseminated only via word of mouth.
For Esparza, the exhibition and the performance have been a bit of a homecoming.
Last year, he was one of 63 artists chosen by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art to participate in the Whitney Biennial, for which he built an earthen gallery within-a-gallery crafted out of adobe bricks — then invited fellow artists to hang their work. Later that year, he created a series of adobe structures, large and small, at the Ballroom Marfa gallery in Marfa, Texas, structures
Where: Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, 1717 E. 7th St., DTLA When: Through July 15 Info: theicala.org