Highlights of the MOLAA Collection
Laura Aguilar, Center #99, 2000-2001
ABOUT THE ARTWORK
Laura Aguilar was a pioneering American photographer and artist whose work explored themes of identity, body image, gender, and culture. As a Latina and queer artist, she used her camera to interrogate the intersection of race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and societal expectations, offering a powerful visual language that was both personal and deeply resonant.
Aguilar's work often centered around the complexities of her own experiences as a Chicana lesbian. She gained recognition for her bold and unapologetic portrayals of marginalized bodies, including her own, challenging conventional ideas of beauty and representation.
Aguilar's work also extended beyond the self, capturing the lives of other queer and Latina communities. In this artwork, along with the series Nature Self-Portraits she started in 1997, she juxtaposed natural landscapes with human forms, emphasizing the beauty of diverse, non-conforming bodies. Her images often explored themes of solitude, empowerment, and the connection between the self and the environment, urging viewers to reconsider their assumptions about identity and place.
BIOGRAPHY
Laura Aguilar was an American photographer. Her identity as a woman of color, a lesbian, and an auditory dyslexic strongly influenced her photographic practice, which she used as a vehicle for exploring and challenging usual notions of identity, the female body, and society’s standards of beauty. Aguilar was a self-taught photographer but studied for a time at the East Los Angeles Community College and participated in the Santa Fe Photographic Workshops and the Friends of Photography Workshop. Her work explored the intricate forms of the human body and the powerful relationship between identity and the land. Over the course of her career, Aguilar’s images were featured in exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Artpace in San Antonio, and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. In 1993, her photography was included in the Aperto section of the Venice Biennale. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including those at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Indiana University, Bloomington; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City.
LAURA AGUILAR
(USA, 1959-2018)
Center #99, 2000-2001
Gelatin silver print, 8 x 10 in./ 20.32 x 25.4 cm.
MOLAA Permanent Collection. Courtesy of The Laura Aguilar Trust of 2016.
Accession: 2021
