Career
Her work focuses on the experiences of often marginalized people such as women of color, lesbians, and women of size, as well as the perception of her own body. Her work has been in the 1993 Venice Biennial, Italy. The Los Angeles City Hall Bridge Gallery, the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), and the Los Angeles Photography Center, Women"s Center Gallery at the University of California in Santa Barbara and elsewhere.
Her work challenges contemporary social constructs of beauty, focusing in large part on lesbian women of color.
She often uses self-portraiture to help her come to terms with her own body as she challenges societal norms of sexuality, class, gender, and race. the social documentary tradition itself. Her more recent self-portraits navigate her personal intersection of identities as Latina, lesbian, dyslexic, and obese.
"My photography has always provided me with an opportunity to open myself up and see the world around me," Aguilar writes. In his 2013 paper on Chicana aesthetics, Daniel Perez writes: Aguilar consciously moves away from the societally normative images of Chicana female bodies and disassociates them from male-centered nostalgia or idealizations.
The theme of reclaiming and reconfiguring Chicana female bodies reflects the influences of feminist critiques by women of color that move beyond identifying sexist and heterosexist perspective that project Chicana feminist aesthetics.
Aguilar tries to "provide a better understanding" of the Latina and lesbian experience by depicting role models that "break negative stereotypes and help develop a better bridge of understanding." A complete list of Aguilar"s exhibitions, publications, grants, and more, is available online at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Notable s Exhibitions Aguilar"s works have appeared in more than 50 national and international exhibitions. Between 1998 and 2003, she has had five solo exhibitions.
In 2014, The Vincent Price Art Museum at East Los Angeles College in collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles Chicano Studies Research Center received a $50,000 grant from the Getty Initiative to develop the first career retrospective of Aguilera"s work.
According to the project"s webpage, the exhibition Laura Aguilar: Retrospective is scheduled for 2017-2018 and will include an "extensive oral history with the artists and a catalog with scholarly essays." Public Collections Her work is in held in several public collections, including ones at The Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction, Indiana University, Bloomington. Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Los Angeles
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Los Angeles The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York City.
And Stanford University, Stanford, California.
