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The Arts Intel Report

Laura Aguilar: Show and Tell

Feb 6 – May 9, 2021
26 Wooster St, New York, NY 10013, United States

The California-born artist Laura Aguilar, who died in 2018 at age 58, struggled with auditory dyslexia. Finding it difficult to communicate with words, she took up photography and found a voice—both for herself and for marginalized groups. Aguilar’s striking photographs, portraiture, and nude self-portraits are powerfully symbolic. They rebel against the colonization of Latin identities, LGBTQ+ disparity, and gender bias. In her striking Three Eagles Flying, Aguilar is positioned between an American and a Mexican flag, her naked body bound with ropes and wrapped in more flags. As she did in so much of her work, she uses the body to disrupt normative concepts of beauty and autonomy. —E.C.

Laura Aguilar, “Three Eagles Flying,” 1990 © Laura Aguilar, Courtesy of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.