The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, has mounted an exhibition titled "Laura Aguilar: Day of the Dead," a show that places the late Chicana photographer's work in the context of the Día de los Muertos tradition.

The exhibition's title signals an unusual pairing: Aguilar, who died in 2018, remains best known for large-format black-and-white photographs — above all her "Nature Self-Portrait" series — in which she placed her own body within desert landscapes of Southern California and beyond, insisting on a visibility that mainstream art institutions long denied queer, Latina, large-bodied subjects. Día de los Muertos, observed on November 1 and 2, is the Mexican tradition of honoring the dead through altars, offerings, and remembrance, a practice with deep roots in California's Mexican American communities.

The announcement of the exhibition at The Huntington is itself notable. For most of its history, the institution collected and displayed British and American grand-manner portraiture, rare books, and Gilded Age interiors; the presence of Aguilar — a self-taught photographer from San Gabriel who worked largely outside academic and institutional channels — marks a continued widening of the museum's program toward the communities of the San Gabriel Valley that surround it. The Huntington has in recent years made deliberate moves in this direction, and an exhibition joining Aguilar's name to one of the most widely practiced Mexican American cultural traditions extends that institutional shift.

For audiences familiar with Aguilar's oeuvre, the framing invites a reading of her photographs as acts of remembrance as much as self-portraiture. Her work with communities — including her long photographic engagement with Latina and LGBTQ subjects in Los Angeles from the 1980s onward — carried an archival impulse: to record people and lives that established institutions had overlooked. A Day of the Dead exhibition honors precisely that impulse, turning the gallery into a space of commemoration for the artist herself as much as for the subjects she photographed.

Details of the exhibition's checklist, dates, and accompanying programming have been announced by The Huntington through its exhibition announcement; readers planning a visit should consult the museum's schedule for exact run dates and related events. As The Huntington continues to integrate artists of the American West and its Mexican American communities into its galleries, "Laura Aguilar: Day of the Dead" suggests the institution's collecting and exhibition history is being actively rewritten — one photographer, and one tradition, at a time.