"Summer," 2023, acrylic, stretched and woven leather, cobbler nails on wood panel, 30 x 24 x 4 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Teaching Artist Cohort
2025
Pilar Agüero-Esparza is a mixed media artist specializing in painting and spatial art through which she explores issues of colorism and social hierarchies while engaging with ideas of materiality, meaning, and the handmade object. She received a BA in Art from the University of California Santa Cruz and an MFA in Spatial Art from San Jose State University. Agüero-Esparza has exhibited her work in numerous institutions including the San Jose Museum of Art, Triton Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, MACLA, Palo Alto Arts Center, Galería de la Raza, the Lawrence Arts Center, the de Young Museum, and the Montalvo Arts Center. In 2017, her work was featured in The U.S.–Mexico Border: Place, Imagination, and Possibility at Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, as part of the Getty Foundation’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative. In 2019, this exhibition traveled to Lille, France, for the Eldorado Lille3000 arts festival, where Agüero-Esparza taught huarache-making workshops at the Maison Folie Wazemmes. In 2022, as an artist-in-residence and Lucas Artist Fellow, she created a large-scale outdoor work for Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in Landscape at the Montalvo Arts Center. In 2025, Agüero-Esparza received the prestigious Eureka Fellowship Award from the Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco. Alongside her art practice, she is a committed educator, having worked as a high school art teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 20 years.
Selected works
“Summer,” 2023, acrylic, stretched and woven leather, cobbler nails on wood panel, 30 x 24 x 4 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Pachuco: Purples & Blues,” 2024, acrylic, stretched and woven leather, cobbler nails on wood panel, 45 x 30 x 1.5 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“South Beach Rebozo,” 2024, acrylic, stretched and woven leather, cobbler nails on wood panel, 48 x 36 x 2.5 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Colored,” 2024, acrylic, leather, cobbler nails on wood panel, 48 x 36 x 10 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“lace/her/womb,” 2024, acrylic and colored pencil on wood panel, leather, cobbler nails, 20 x 12 x 5 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
“Curves: Pinks, Peaches, Purples,” 2023, acrylic, stretched and woven leather, cobbler nails on wood panel, 60 x 48 x 3 in. Photo courtesy of the artist.
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Gallery Hours: Closed — Reopening Fall 2019
