Fernanda Laguna (b. Hurlingham, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1972) is a visual artist, writer, activist, art producer. She is one of the most relevant and influential Argentinean artists of her generation, due to her multifaceted art practice which centers on visual art, but includes celebrated poetry and novels, creation of alternative cultural spaces and projects, and an effective social practice which she has carried on for twenty years in the marginalized, extremely poor neighborhood of Villa Fiorito, where her art workshops and projects have effectively changed the lives of local children and women, becoming a center of feminist activism in the midst of an area where gender violence is endemic. In 2000 she co-founded Belleza y Felicidad (Beauty and Happiness) an artist-run art gallery and publishing project which was a watershed moment in the development of contemporary art in Argentina. Laguna run Belleza y Felicidad for nine years and in 2003 she opened the current branch at Villa Fiorito which functions as a place for community-generated art projects, art workshops for children and which has also become a center for feminist activities. Among many other projects, she was involved in founding Eloisa Cartonera, a successful project that brought together writers and people living out of collecting cardboards in the streets, which has been replicated in several cities worldwide. Her work is intersected by several recurring themes: erotic desire expressed from a woman’s standpoint; the spontaneous and the irrational; appropriation of local popular handcrafts and iconography; an interest in precarious, vulnerable materials and constructions yet at the same time in classic vernacular modernist painterly traditions such as geometric abstraction or metaphysical painting; a nuanced concern about social inequalities, and above all, an immediacy of expression of her subjectivity.
Aside from her visual art production she has published several books of poetry as well as novels under the pseudonym of Dalia Rosetti, which are among of the first openly queer novels in Argentina. Her poetry has been translated to English and published in the USA. Her latest novel was published by Random House. She has co-written a book about participating in the recent feminist tide with gender theorist Cecilia Palmeiro.
Laguna has participated in the Mercosul Biennial, Porto Alegre, Brazil; the Cuenca Biennial, Ecuador; Casa Tomada, Sitelines, Site Santa Fe, and A Universal History of Infamy at LACMA among other international group exhibitions. Belleza y Felicidad ́s low-cost publishing project was the subject of an exhibition at the Sculpture Center, New York, in 2015. In 2022 The Drawing Center, New York, presented an anthological solo exhibition curated by Rosario Guiraldes. In 2020 she had a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Richmond, Virginia, centered on her paintings 2010-2020, along with a room for Mareadas en la Marea (High on the Tide), a project showcasing artifacts, documentation and memorabilia from feminist demonstrations in Argentina in recent years.
Fernanda Laguna’s works are in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Reina Sofia (via donation of Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, New York); Jorge Perez-PAMM, Miami; Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires; Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (MALBA); Los Angeles County Museum of Art; CA2M, Madrid; Kadist Foundation, San Francisco; Rufino Tamayo Museum, Mexico; The Museum of Modern Art, New York.