Bio: Daniel Esquivia Zapata is an Afro-Colombian artist and educator. He is an Assistant Professor of Art at Auburn University, specializing in drawing. He holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BA in Studio Art from Benedict College (Historical Black College).  Before teaching at Auburn, Daniel taught at various institutions, including Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, focusing on a wide range of drawing courses on human anatomy, figure drawing, fundamental drawing, and experimental drawing. In addition to his teaching. Daniel has a strong exhibition record with solo and group shows across the United States, Colombia, and internationally. His work has been featured in venues such as the Whatcom Museum and the Richard Demato Gallery. He has also participated in numerous artist residencies, including the Santa Fe Art Institute and a fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center; recently, he was a summer artist at 701 CCA in Columbia, SC, and was selected as a 2025 visiting artist to the Gibbes Museum of Art. His contributions to the art community extend beyond the classroom and gallery. He has been involved in public art projects, including murals that address memory and social justice themes. His research and presentations often explore the intersection of art, violence, and historical memory, reflecting his commitment to using drawing as a tool for social change and as a mode of inquiry.

Statement:

Daniel’s work explores ideas about historical memory, official historical narratives, and what he terms the politics of remembering. He does this through life-size figurative drawings that combine historical texts, the human body, plants, and animals to generate strong spaces that work as poetic imagery, probing the dynamics of narratives in history and historical memory. To create these drawings, he uses a combination of traditional figure drawing techniques, liquid charcoal and fragmented print, and hand-written texts to draw on several layers of mylar, creating life-size drawings to create news bodies that work as metaphors for political bodies intersected by history, newspaper articles, archives, looking to make visible ¨the of place of memory¨ that are our bodies among the discourses that intersect them