UIC Gallery 400 40th anniversary

Mark Aguhar (b. 1987, d. 2012) was a transgender Filipinx American artist, activist, and writer. Their work explores strategies of queer expression and what it means to have grown up gay on the internet. Aguhar collected visual artifacts from queer online communities and used them to define and redefine who they were and how their body moved through the world. Aguhar’s work combines porn, fashion, textile patterns, optical effects, trans identities, and queer jokes. Their work does not aim to represent the entirety of the LGBTQIA+ community or make transgender embodiment easily intelligible. Rather, Aguhar leads viewers to interrogate their relationships to queerness by expressing the artist’s own situated experience on the spectrums of gender, sexuality, race, and body.

Aguhar attended the University of Illinois Chicago’s MFA program from 2010 to 2012. This image documents a performance of Aguhar’s in the program.

You can find their work here.