Laura Aguilar and Gil Cuadros: Legacies of 1990s Los Angeles Chicanx Resistance through Illness and Queer Friendship

Abstract

This article explores the photography of Laura Aguilar through a research methodology that centers friendship and caretaking, a method that accentuates the centrality of queer community and love in her work and that makes visible a Chicanx AIDS consciousness, an awareness of the intersectional effects of AIDS within everyday Chicanx life and history. This research not only considers Aguilar's already-recognized work but also her physical home, her life story, her personal relationships, and her unpublished/unexhibited work, which reveal the multiple ways that AIDS appears throughout her artistic oeuvre and her life. Central to my analysis of Aguilar's photographic production is her long-standing friendship with writer Gil Cuadros, a tumultuous yet highly generative partnership for both artists. Their friendship reveals the need to look beyond the more obvious political imagery and organizational history of AIDS and to investigate the intimate and complex familial and community networks of that period. Understanding the importance of Aguilar and Cuadros's friendship to each other's work allows for a greater understanding of the way that art and activism inform one another through personal and queer familial bonds.