Laura Aguilar
Nature Self Portrait #7

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Artist Laura Aguilar(American, 1959–2018)American, 1959–2018

CultureAmerican

Titles

Nature Self Portrait #7

Date1996

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 15 1/16 × 18 15/16 in. (38.3 × 48.1 cm)
Sheet: 15 15/16 × 19 7/8 in. (40.5 × 50.5 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Kerry Inman, Joan Morgenstern, Anne Wilkes Tucker, and Morris Weiner

Object number2019.225

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionAlthough she created work based on her identity Laura Aguilar felt strongly that her photographs were not strictly self-portraits, but rather challenges to prevailing ideologies. Her "Nature Self-Portraits," begun in the mid-1990s, present the artist’s own nude body posed amid the rocky landscape of Southern California’s Inland Empire. Aguilar’s work questions notions of beauty, the tradition of the female body being likened to a landscape, the absence of brown and big bodies in art, and the nationalist traditions embedded in the American landscape.
ProvenanceLaura Aguilar Trust, Los Angeles; purchased by MFAH, 2019.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

Signed in pencil, verso, center: Laura Aguilar 1996 // 9/10

Signed in pencil, verso, center: Laura Aguilar

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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