THE SHOCK SHOW AND TELL.

• Position: FOCUS

LESBIAN, LATINA, and large-bodied, Laura Aguilar fearlessly puts it all out there with "Show and Tell." The first comprehensive retrospective of her work assembles more than 100 photographs and video spanning three decades. A rebellious and groundbreaking Chicana, Aguilar--born in 1959 and raised in California's San Gabriel Valley--has been heralded for establishing the artist as a powerful voice for diverse "invisible" communities, and for disrupting repressive stereotypes of beauty and body representation.

Often political as well as personal, the bold portraits cut across performative, feminist, and queer art genres. The images captured through her lens reflect Aguilar's struggles with depression, obesity, self-acceptance, prejudice, and misogyny. Challenged by auditory dyslexia, she struggled with words and turned to her camera to penetrate the underground LGBT world around her in the East Los Angeles of the 1980s and 1990s.

Her later works cross into never-before-seen territory: Aguilar's daring self-portraits juxtapose her oversized, naked body alongside desolate terrains, hulking boulders, and stark bodies of water. The guest comment book inside the galleries of Miami's Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University--where the exhibit is on view through May 27--is overflowing with handwritten messages proclaiming shock, outrage, loneliness, hope, and inspiration, ranging from "How could you do something like this?" to "I've been waiting for something like this all of my life."

"Laura Aguilar's works express raw honesty without demanding a singular response, and we are seeing how her exhibition is providing transformative experiences for those who are open to it," says Jordana Pomeroy, director of the Frost Art Museum. "We are honored to be selected as the venue where the public can currently experience Aguilar's powerful approach to camera work, and her humanistic eye on her subject matter.

"Exhibited outside of its native Southern California context, Aguilar's exhibition resounds strongly to our East Coast, Latin American, and Caribbean audiences--with universal truths about the ways we view others who may not look like ourselves or share our backgrounds."

"Show and Tell" reflects the trajectory of an artist unable...