Introduction

Valeria Miranda Sesnon Gallery Curator and Director

Exhibition Dates: January 8 – February 7, 2026

 

The Mary Porter Sesnon Art Gallery is proud to present Cut / Woven / Spoken, featuring a thoughtprovoking body of work by UCSC Art Department Alumna Pilar Agüero-Esparza. The artworks featured in Cut / Woven / Spoken locate Agüero-Esparza within a small group of diasporic artists that choose abstraction, over figurative depictions of their cultural identities, as fundamental expressions of their explorations and creative freedom. The artist investigates how language, culture, and materials communicate who we are. For Agüero-Esparza, language is not limited to words, it also lives in color, texture, and in traditions passed down within families and communities.

On a recent trip to Mexico, Agüero-Esparza met with women weavers who maintain the traditions that shaped her father’s huarache-making craft. Their labor, skill, and generational knowledge directly inform her practice. By bringing women’s craft, abstraction, and material experimentation into the same frame, Agüero-Esparza is a trailblazer, expanding what abstraction can hold and honoring the feminist histories embedded in everyday materials. The artist’s explorations of culture and art-making resonate with the UCSC Arts Division’s unique combination of visionary creativity, interdisciplinary collaboration, and a deep commitment to social and environmental justice. I have had the honor to know and work with Pilar Agüero-Esparza since the mid-nineties through our tenures at the San José Museum of Art. Her artwork has always been awe-inspiring and her practice has always incorporated thoughtful mentorship of and collaboration with younger artists: she perfectly exemplifies the creative professional that UCSC students can connect with and look up to.

I would like to dedicate this catalogue to the artist’s late husband Chris Esparza, who became an ancestor far too young in the summer of 2024. His incredible dedication to creating a mutually supportive arts ecosystem through creating joyful opportunities for a wide, diverse variety of visual and performing artists has inspired my work as a curator and as a citizen.

The Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery would like to thank UCSC History of Art and Visual Culture student and gallery curatorial assistant Mariam Cissé for researching and interviewing Pilar Agüero-Esparza. A big thank you to Interim Dean Lawrence Andrews and the Arts Division for supporting the Sesnon’s important mission of uplifting the work and ideas of students, faculty, and alumni.

 

Woven Abstraction: Corporal topographies in the work of Pilar Agüero-Esparza

Jennifer Gonzalez

 

Because the biggest battle

now is not to lose our spirit.

They can’t rob us of our joy,

our laughter,

our way of gathering around a pot of beans

and calling it a feast.

Now is the time to love harder,

to sing louder,

to kiss our children and dance in the kitchen.

Now is when we thank God

we are not machines—

we feel, we cry, we celebrate,

we live in color.

—Yosimar Reyes

Excerpt from the poem “Mami Calls Me After Univision Airs the News”

 

Pilar Agüero-Esparza’s paintings are a form of story re-telling; they operate as allegories of place and time, land and landscape, bodies and belonging. Trained in fine arts and artisanal practices, she brings unanticipated choreographies to these historically separated repertoires. Combining painterly abstraction with leather weaving techniques from Mexico, she offers a fresh perspective on both traditions, while also inviting us to contemplate aesthetic intersections that carry a political valence. Gesturing to post-painterly abstraction of 1960s Minimalism, with its tendency toward monochromes and hard-edge geometries, the work also relies upon skillfully woven leatherwork that lifts away from the surface of the canvas in tactile ribbons and flows of fringe. The woven leather makes reference to her parents’ livelihood, which entailed manufacturing and distributing hand-made Mexican footwear called huaraches.1 Familiar to many, these intricately woven sandals date to the pre-conquest era when they were made from plant fibers; geographically, their origins lie in different communities in the Yucatán, Michoacán, Guanajuato and Jalisco.2 Leather replaced plant f ibers after the arrival of the Spanish, while the intricate weaving patterns varied from region to region, symbolically representing the identity or heritage of the weaver.3 Frequently, patterns and unique designs colored lines remind me of Mexican pastries, called pan dulce found in panaderías (bakeries) on both sides of the U.S. Mexico border. A feeling of morning time, the sky a pale blue, the warmth of coffee and sweet pastry come to mind. At the same time two worlds are conjoined here, not opposing but differently articulated.

In the same Lace series, we find several works that more explicitly reference the elements. Water, the source of life, is also a source of power. In Lace: darker than deepest sea, weaker than palest blue (2024) we are treated to a shimmering play between the reflective surface of leather woven in waves that fold in upon themselves and drip with fringe, and a countervailing sky-space of rain, with and almost 1960s design feel to the pattern of water drops, not only in light and dark blues, but also in dark browns and pale beige. The two visual systems seem at odds, as if drawn from two entirely different design paradigms. This clash suggests a tension between nature and culture, perhaps, between allegory and realism. The shape of the waves could also imply a body, prone and outstretched, just as the drops might imply individual bodies dropping into the sea. A kind of riddle, the title is a puzzle; what is it that is so dark, so weak?

In Lace: Sol (2024) there is a much stronger single-point perspective approach to the canvas where we see a clear horizon line and rays of bright yellow between bars of earth tones and sky tones, as if the day is laid out before us in all moments of the coming and going of the sun. Below the horizon line an optical play of horizontal leather strips seems to create a flat plateau, a waterfall of fringe that hangs down the center like the parting of the seas. Agüero-Esparza has taken up this water flow with horizontal bands leaving the elements together as if stitching the very ground together, the warp and the weft skimming the flow, and creating stability. The world is a site that is created by those who inhabit it; not just humans, but all the intricate complexity of the non-human actors. For Lace: Sol, and throughout the exhibition, the artist leaves loose threads here and there, signs of manufacture, following in the Indigenous traditions of weaving in Mexico, where an uncut thread symbolizes the belief that life itself is a woven work and must never end.5

Iconic figures also factor into the artist’s allegorical references. Lace: Coatlicue (2023), is a modest and highly abstract representation of the Aztec (Mixtec) earth goddess of the same name. The original, which inspired this isomorphic model, takes the form of an enormous basalt stone sculpture that is characterized by its squared-off shape and a face composed of two snake heads facing each together. Though the body of the stone deity is clearly human and female, it also has clawed jaguar paws for hands and feet like eagle talons. Scholars are still debating its full archeological and cultural significance, but some have suggested that Coatlicue is best understood as a kind of incarnated being with multiple identities, engaged in a process of transformation through which a plural and even contradictory set of relations between divine and human agents take place.6 Signaling a long tradition in Chicana art practice of the last fifty years that includes key figures such as Yolanda Lopez and Amalia Mesa-Bains among many others, Lace: Coatlicue adds to the pantheon of visual interpretations of this important goddess figure, who has come to symbolize strength, power and transformation. For women artists coming from immigrant backgrounds, who have sometimes faced the persistence of racism and classism, this Indigenous symbol of strength and power provides a decolonial alternative to female role models established by a Euro-American mainstream.

Here the artist has simplified the figure into skin and water, sky and earth with only the slightest curvilinear shapes suggesting eyes or serpents. In the tradition of Jack Whitten, whom the artist admires, abstraction does not need to eschew politics.7 It is toward a decolonial understanding of the world, toward a renewed attention to Indigenous models of living harmoniously with the land and water, and especially each other that much of this work inclines.

In earlier work, Agüero-Esparza has explored the ways skin tone and colorism influence our sense of self. Moved by the experience of imagining her daughter playing with a pack of Crayola Multicultural Crayons, and having to choose a skin color, she decided to develop a palette based on these basic tones.8 It also inspired several works that use leather in various skin tones to explore the relation among bodies and the land. In Colored (2024) a topography of different colored pieces of leather are sewn together to form a painterly surface. There is something sensual about the folded leather, the shapes, the stitching and feminine in the intimate lace detailing on the left-hand side of the canvas. Loose threads and fringes that emphasize the maker’s process of production invite comparison with Maria Cabrera’s soft sculpture, as well as feminist traditions of textile art championed in the 1970schampioned in the 1970s. The blocks of monochrome colors echo painter Byron Kim’s installation of small monochromes titled Synecdoche (1991–present), in which the artist creates simple “portraits” of an infinite variety of skin colors, emphasizing, as scholar Camara Dia Holloway observes, “the elusive nature of racial ascription.” 9 But there are important differences. The title of Agüero-Esparza’s work invites us to think about the way language is used to categorize bodies, to create a linguistic prison-house of belonging or un-belonging. At a time when the Supreme Court of the United States has approved the policing of people based on phenotype—sometimes called “racial profiling”—the bodies of brown men and women are unfairly targeted.10 Some of us are proud to call ourselves “colored,” relishing the beauty and warmth of skin tones that register on the darker end of the spectrum, despite the fact that to be “colored” was once a term of oppression. This painting reminds us that all of us are colored. The human body has a wide chromatic spectrum, from soft pinks and translucent grays to the tonal range of coffee and chocolate. The artist’s decision to create curvilinear sutures that divide the space into loose triangles and trapezoids, suggestive of torsos and the folds of skin that appear in the creases of our limbs, produces a feeling that actual bodies are present, but also absent. Fragmented, piecemeal, these can only be partial portraits. Colored invites an intersectional interpretation, refusing gender or racial typologies that would separate those who are here symbolically stitched together: is it a work of celebration, a work of mourning, or perhaps both? In an interview, the artist commented that she was inspired in part by the work of Columbian artist Doris Salcedo, whose careful use of thread and looped stitches defined archival spaces for intimate forms of mourning or memory. 11 Chicana feminist scholar Rosalinda Fragoso has written movingly about violence against women in her book The Force of Witness: Contra Femicide, emphasizing the importance of female collective witnessing as a form of cultural transformation. Agüero-Esparza’s painted skin-like fragments remind us that women’s bodies are frequently treated as if they were little more than flesh. The painting may develop out of monochrome painting traditions, like Synechdoche, but takes a critical turn toward collective witnessing, toward our inseparable interdependencies and shared embodiment.

Sometimes abstraction is intended to operate allegorically or symbolically, and sometimes its meaning is more direct. In her wall installation, Lenguas Maternas (2025), the artist constructs a map of the largest Indigenous language groups currently spoken across Mexico. With a similar patchwork of carefully shaped blocks of color, the work occupies a full wall of the gallery space. For those familiar with the map of Mexico, the outline will be immediately legible. But unlike most maps, this one is not organized by states, but rather by linguistic usage: a salutary corrective to the way we commonly conceive of territories and mapping, as well as cultural belonging. Mayo, Zapoteco, Nahuatl, Huichol, Purépecha, Otomí, and other linguistic groups are shown to stretch across vast territories, defying the borders of states and nations drawn up by colonists and nationalists hundreds of years ago. The map invites us to imagine a world in which we honor and recognize Indigenous populations, in which alternative topographies are given the opportunity to define a sense of belonging, of place, and of a people. Here the colors are ultimately arbitrary, having no specific relation to geography, but they still resemble skin tones, inviting viewers to recall that Mexico, like the United States, has diverse populations with linguistic traditions that have survived colonization, that remain vibrant and alive.

 

Jennifer a. González is Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She has published widely in journals such as, Bomb, Open Space, Art Journal, Aztlán, the Journal of the Archives of American Art and in numerous exhibition catalogs, most recently in Diego Rivera’s America, SFMOMA (2022) and Amalia Mesa Bains: Archeology of Memory (2023), Isaac Julien: I Dream a World (2025). She is the chief editor of Chicano and Chicana Art: A Critical Anthology (Duke University Press, 2019).

Yosimar Reyes is the current Santa Clara County Poet Laureate and was named the 2024 Creative Ambassador by the City of San José. A writer, poet, and performer, Reyes is widely recognized for his compelling storytelling and exploration of the undocumented and queer.

Endnotes  1 Michelle Runde, “Pilar Agüero-Esparza,” in Content: The Creative People of Silicon Valley, 2025. https://www.contentmagazine.com/articles/9-5-3-pilar-esparza/ Unpaginated. 2 Dorany Pineda, “Feel like you’re seeing the humble huarache everywhere? You’re right,” Los Angeles Times (Online) Los Angeles Times Communications LLC. Dec 11, 2020. Unpaginated. 3 “The Rich History of Huarache Sandals: A Journey Through Time,” in Vintage Artisan, August 20, 2024. https://www. vintageartisan.com/blogs/news/the-rich-history-ofhuarache-sandals-a-journey-through-time. Accessed December 7, 2025. 4 Ibid. 5 Donald Cordry, “Mexico Weaves” in Craft Horizons, July/ August (1955): 21 6 Linares, Federico Navarrete. “Aztec Monoliths as TimeShaping Devices: Coatlicue, Piedra Del Sol and Piedra de Tízoc.” Revista de Antropologia 62, no. 3 (2019): 744–68. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26875520. P.747 7 Pilar Agüero-Esparza, interview with the author, Santa Cruz, CA, October 22, 2025. 8 Donald Cordry, “Mexico Weaves” in Craft Horizons, July/ August (1955): 21. 9 Holloway, Camara Dia. “Critical Race Art History.” Art Journal 75, no. 1 (2016): 89–92. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/43967657. P.92. 10 Jared McClain, “He’s a citizen with a Real ID. ICE detained him anyway. Twice.” The Washington Post (Online) WP Company LLC d/b/a The Washington Post. Nov 10, 2025. Unpaginated. 11 Pilar Agüero-Esparza, interview with the author, Santa Cruz, CA, October 22, 2025. Next spread: Lace: Sol, 2025, acrylic, stretched leather, cobbler nails, on wood panel.