In her solo show at Women & Their Work Jenelle Esparza uses repurposed heirlooms and found tools, alongside cotton textiles, to explore her family’s generation’s long connection to the land through cotton farming. Esparza’s artistic engagement with these materials bears witness to the violence historically present in the South Texas cotton economy.

Jenelle Esparza will join artists Alanna Fields and Olivia Jia at the Fountainhead Residency in Miami in July 2023.

Formation, Featuring work by Emily Mayo, Jenelle Esparza, and Earline Green.
September 10 thru November 12, 2022 | Kinfolk House in Fort Worth, TX
For our first year, it was important that each of our projects embody Kinfolk House’s core values. Our inaugural project, Welcome, featuring works by founders Sedrick and Letitia Huckaby, served to ground the space in family, tradition, and legacy. Our second project, Congregate, was an investigation of the complexity of community, culture, and isolation. Formation brings together artists working in sculpture and considers the significance of assets such as home and land as the basis for building something larger than oneself.

Sites of Memory is an exhibition featuring newly commissioned and recent works by San Antonio-based artist Jenelle Esparza and Houston-based artist Verónica Gaona, who come together to explore the impermanent nature of land and its residual energy through the use of objects, land-based materials, and living and historical research. This exhibition builds on conversations between Esparza and Gaona as they work to further explore the impacts of migration, familial legacy, transnationality, migratory labor, and ideas related to rest.

Sites of Memory explores the relationship between the body, history, and land. It is the next iteration of Overlapping Territories, an ongoing project about interconnected relationships to land, curated by Ashley DeHoyos, who is working with artists to identify and trace a network of knowledge and experiences through public conversations, art, and interviews with other curators, cultural producers, and scholars from across the Southwest United States.

The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) has acquired nine artworks by eight San Antonio-based artists, including "Continent" by Jenelle Esparza (American, born 1985). The acquisitions are part of the Museum’s Initiative to Acquire Art by Contemporary San Antonio Artists. Film Produced by Walley Films. Learn more at https://www.samuseum.org/learn.

Through textile and experimental weaving techniques, Jenelle Esparza communicates powerful messages by isolating cotton fiber as a symbol of labor, land, and legacy. Esparza discusses her work and research on South Texas histories in a conversation with René Paul Barilleaux, Head of Curatorial Affairs. A brief weaving lesson with Rene completes the experience.

Funding for the creation of Esparza’s Vessels was provided through an Artist Grant from the City of San Antonio, Department of Arts & Culture.

February 2, 2022 - August 7, 2022
Located in front of Chiego Lecture Hall

McNay Museum Educator for Family Experiences and accomplished artist, Jenelle Esparza, is featured in the latest Artists Looking at Art (ALA), a series created to salute the vitality of the contemporary art community in the San Antonio area. Esparza’s new series of textile pieces depicts imagery and patterns that respond to “hyper-local” histories within the South Texas region. The pieces are abstract representations of earthly and bodily experiences that have been recorded within a landscape.

With experimental weaving techniques, Esparza highlights hidden histories of Mexican American, Tejano, and Indigenous narratives in her home region of South Texas.

STATE OF THE ART: RECORD
On view: March 10–June 19, 2022

Recordings preserve information. This can include an idea, a sound, a moment in time—the important outcome remains the same: the record. The artworks in this exhibition, titled State of the Art: Record, reveal a broad expanse of this concept. Some of these artists grapple with the constantly unfolding historical record. Others use their work as a way to record concepts too big for words or too abstract for simple explanation. Others employ their artistic skills to order their surroundings, transforming chaos into something manageable. Record speaks to the task of documenting the random, confusing, and sometimes inexplicable, and underscores a desire to return to the existing record in order to reconsider.

These 20 artists represent a sample of American art created in recent years. The approaches, backgrounds, and details of these artists’ practices vary widely but the echoes across works and sections of the show speak to broader trends in contemporary art in this country. Organized around the theme of “record,” this focused exhibition invites visitors to consider how these artists put this theme into action. Artists included in this exhibition are David Harper, Damian Stamer, Carla Edwards, Jenelle Esparza, Marcel Pardo Ariza, Kate Budd, Mari Hernandez, Tabitha Nikolai, Enrico Riley, Jordan Seaberry, Diego Rodriguez-Warner, Frances Bagley, Peter Everett, Mae Aur, Alex Chitty, Paul Stephen Benjamin, Jill Downen, Kellie Romany, Nicolas Lobo, and Cory Imig.

With the acquisition of eight artworks by seven San Antonio artists, the San Antonio Museum of Art looks to renew its recent commitment to support living, local artists via its Initiative to Acquire Art by Contemporary San Antonio Artists.
The artists in this round of acquisitions — Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Jenelle Esparza, Joe Harjo, Jon Lee, Ethel Shipton, Chris Sauter, and Liz Ward — were selected by a specially convened advisory committee that included local collectors, professors, artists, and arts leaders.
Story by James Courtney

Glasstire shares the news of new acquisitions at the San Antonio Museum of Art and their efforts to expand their collection with works by contemporary women and Texas artists.

Artists and curators from all over Texas highlight what's new in these 30-minute lunch break discussions. Jenelle will be in conversation with Lauren Thompson, Assistant Curator at the McNay Art Museum.

Registration is free, talk takes place June 1st at noon CST.

Art Break: Touching Pictures
Friday, May 21, 2021, 12PM
Artist Jenelle Esparza and Naoko Takahatake, curator of prints and drawings, Getty Research Institute, discuss artworks that deal with grief by visualizing and utilizing the touch of the artist. Moderated by Mazie Harris, assistant curator, Getty Museum. Registration link available.

Plurality of Isolations group exhibition opens at Ruiz Healy Art in San Antonio. Showcase of work made by artists during the pandemic. On view February 24 through April 24, 2021.

Women & Their Work is pleased to announce the artists selected for our 2021 solo exhibition series. Chosen from a recent call for entries, these artists were selected from a field of nearly 300 entries sent in from across the state. Each artist will create a new body of work for her exhibition.

In celebration of its 25th anniversary, Artpace San Antonio has published a 272-page volume of never-before-published curatorial essays and full-color images of every exhibition created through its International Artist-in-Residence program from 2008 to 2019.

During the pandemic shutdown, the acclaimed artists residency and art venue, Artpace, in San Antonio, has a bit of extra room in its residency space to host an informal writing residency in collaboration with Glasstire. Colette Copeland, a North Texas-based artist, educator, and longtime Glasstire contributor is the current resident of the two-week program. This diary entry is part of a two-part installment about her days in San Antonio; Copeland will also bring us several artist profiles. Read part one with the link at the end of this article.

My installation, Through the Threshold, was funded by a grant from the Luminaria Artist Foundation in 2020.

Glasstire's Christopher Blay checks in with Jenelle Esparza during the COVID19 pandemonium.

This was fun! Jenelle Esparza announces Glasstire's Top 5 exhibitions with Neil Fauerso.

Nancy Zastudil writes about three San Antonio artists featured in the State of the Art 2020 exhibition at Crystal Bridges Museum.

Chicago Tribune mentions DePaul exhibition Remember Where You Are as must-see show.

Artpace in San Antonio kicks off yearlong look at works by women with ‘Visibilities’

VISIBILITIES: INTREPID WOMEN OF ARTPACE

‘Visibilities: Intrepid Women of Artpace’ Group Show to Open Year-Long Celebration of Female Artists