Today HBO released the official trailer for the documentary, A Choice Of Weapons: Inspired By Gordon Parks. The film explores the enduring legacy of photographer, writer, composer, activist and filmmaker, Gordon Parks, and spotlights his visionary work and its impact on the next generation of artists. The film debuts Monday, November 15 (10:00-11:30 p.m. ET/PT), commemorating Gordon Parks birthday (November 30) and will debut on HBO and be available to stream on HBO Max.
The life and work of Gordon Parks remains strikingly relevant today. A Choice Of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks explores the power of images to inspire a new generation to work for social change. Through the lens of three contemporary photographers, we see Gordon’s legacy come to life. Devin Allen whose photograph “Baltimore Uprising” of the Freddie Gray protests was featured on the cover of Time Magazine; LaToya Ruby Frazier who for five years followed the Flint, Michigan water crisis and most recently photographed Breonna Taylor’s family for Vanity Fair; and Jamel Shabazz whose photographs on the streets of New York form a visual history of the hip hop era while simultaneously presenting affirming images for his community.
‘A Choice Of Weapons: Inspired By Gordon Parks’ an HBO original documentary about legendary photographer Gordon Parks and the influence he’s had on a new generation of artists.
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Clément Chéroux Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography
Michelle Elligott Chief of Archives, Library, and Research Collections
MoMA selects LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Last Cruze (The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2020) as one of ‘Our Favorite Photobooks of 2021’
[MoMA is] launching a new yearly celebration of the photobook. The list comprises 10 favorite photobooks of 2021, dating between July 2020 and August 2021. These books are now part of [the MoMA] Library collection, and are also available for anyone to purchase in the [MoMA] Design Store. Here, we’ve invited our colleagues across the Photography and Archives, Library, and Research Collections departments to contribute short descriptions of these standout titles.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Last Cruze
In The Last Cruze (The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2020), LaToya Ruby Frazier documents the ripple effects caused by General Motors’ decision in November 2018 to “unallocate” its plant in Lordstown, Ohio. After more than 50 years in operation, in March 2019 GM called off production of the Chevrolet Cruze, leaving some 2,000 factory workers and their families uprooted. The events caused a historic loss of heritage in Lordstown, bringing intensified attention to the small Rust Belt town, which emerged as a subject of political dispute. The book pairs Frazier’s black-and-white portraits of working-class Americans with their unflinching testimonies, and brings together a selection of color images taken by Kasey King, an autoworker and photographer for the labor union UAW Local 1112, inside the plant (where Frazier was not allowed to photograph). A careful, research-driven project, The Last Cruze includes a timeline of union history in America and a series of incisive essays by writer Coco Fusco, art historian Benjamin J. Young, curators Karsten Lund and Solveig Øvstebø, and sociologist Werner Lange, alongside interviews with Marxist geographer David Harvey, US Senator Sherrod Brown, and the playwright Lynn Nottage. Frazier’s project amplifies a deep lineage of socially engaged photobooks by Gordon Parks, and is linked to the conceptual practices of Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula.
–Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator, Department of Photography
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LaToya Ruby Frazier was awarded the 2021 RPS Honorary Fellowship Award for her exceptional and innovative work connected to the art or science of photography.
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The New York Times Fine Arts & Exhibits special report By Geraldine Fabrikant
From New York to Los Angeles, Black, L.G.B.T.Q., Native American and women artists are exhibiting works that highlight their communities and personal perspectives.
During the pandemic, Isolde Brielmaier, curator at large at the International Center of Photography, began wondering how Black photographers were navigating that crisis — particularly as the battle for racial justice heightened after the murder of George Floyd and the 2020 presidential race played out.
So she picked five emerging photographers, all of whom live in the United States, who she said are “representative of a generation coming up today.’’ The result is “Inward: Reflections on Interiority,” an exhibition of 47 images that draws on the genres of self portraiture.
Included in the exhibition are works by Djeneba Aduayom, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Quil Lemons, Brad Ogbonna and Isaac West that go “beyond simply documenting the world in which they moved,” Ms. Brielmaier said. “This is a generation who has a certain sense of freedom to work across what used to be fairly firm boundaries.”
The photographers were directed to use their smartphones — “their image-making tool,” she said — and turn the lens on themselves. “And they are sharing images that reflect their interior lives,” Ms. Brielmaier said.
The show at the International Center of Photography on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, which runs until Jan. 10, is one of many across the United States that is spotlighting the work of Black photographers, as well as artists from other racial and ethnic groups.
Museums and galleries in Los Angeles, St. Louis, Boston, New York and Richmond, Va., among others, have been featuring works that show the range of art being created by once-marginalized artists, and provide insights into their outer worlds and individual perspectives.
The works cover a variety of styles and focus, including portraiture, conceptual pieces and fashion photography. The artists are both newcomers and others who already are established in the photography world.
[…]
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s show, “The Last Cruze,” at the California African American Museum focuses on the impact of a 2019 General Motors plant closing. Here, Kesha Scales hugs her friend and former co-worker Beverly Williams after the Lordstown, Ohio, shutdown. LaToya Ruby Frazier, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
The California African American Museum in Los Angeles is exhibiting the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier. “The Last Cruze,” which runs until March 20, chronicles the closing of the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in 2019, and the impact on its workers. Ms. Frazier’s family migrated from the South to Braddock, Pa., the home of Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill, and her life experience provided an intimate perspective on the costs of plant shutdowns.
“The intention was to show the true value of labor and solidarity,” Ms. Frazier said of “The Last Cruze.” “We desperately need it right now.”
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Los Angeles Times Art Review By Christopher Knight, Art Critic
Unions built the American middle class in the decades after the Great Depression of the 1930s, the common wisdom goes, and a mountain of evidence backs up the claim. Yet things have been bleak in that regard for many years.
One example is the centerpiece of a keen and moving installation by LaToya Ruby Frazier at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park. “The Last Cruze” charts the devastating 2019 shuttering of a General Motors auto plant in the once solidly middle-class village of Lordstown, Ohio. Frazier, who grew up just outside Pittsburgh, less than 100 miles to the southeast, chronicles the closure’s myriad effects on the workers, most affiliated with UAW Local 1112.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, “The Last Cruze (detail),” 2019, mixed media (Elon Schoenholz)
The share of American adults who live in middle-income households tumbled from 61% in 1971 to 51% in the year the GM factory closed, according to the Pew Research Center. Union membership has plummeted to the low teens, a decline that has contributed to the ruinous wealth gap that plagues us today, affecting everything from the crime rate to the functioning of democracy itself.
Famously instrumental to the battering was the Reagan administration’s sudden 1981 firing of more than 11,000 striking workers in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization. Open season was declared on organized labor.
In her terrific recent book, “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” social justice policy analyst Heather McGhee definitively outlines a different yet plainly related factor, which unfolded over many years: “Somewhere along the line, white people stopped defending the institutions that, more than almost any other, had enabled their prosperity for generations.”
Unions were one fundamental institution where support collapsed. Lately they’ve been witnessing a change of fortune, with President Biden the most pro-union chief executive in decades and art museums (and newspapers) among those creating a unionization boomlet.
McGhee’s persuasive observation, which digs into the racially framed causes for that larger breakdown in general union support, came to mind as I was looking at Frazier’s insightful documentary narrative at CAAM. The installation includes 67 photographs and a video; the array of union workers embodies a multiracial democracy.
The still pictures are black-and-white, a signal for alliance with the tradition of incisive social documentary camerawork launched in the late 19th century by artists like Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. (Riis documented New York’s rising tide of unemployed and unhoused immigrants, and Hine the brutal child labor once common to profitable industry.) Black-and-white stands outside the usual commercial and vernacular histories, where color photographs have become routine.
The video is in color. Including commentary on the last Chevy Cruze auto to roll off the Lordstown assembly line — hence the show’s title — it suggests television’s increased authority in the documentary genre.
Surprisingly, these documentary camera legacies merge with installation art. These aren’t framed pictures hanging on a wall. To display the photographs, most of them portraits of GM workers whose biographies and work histories are laid out in accompanying printed texts, Frazier built an architectural construction that runs the length of the gallery. The structure gives the show a veritable spine.
Each display panel’s shape is loosely reminiscent of a car door, lined up one after the next. Painted a bright, safety-conscious red-orange, the structure’s repetitive form mimics the machinery of an assembly line. Suspended panels alternate with panels that reach to the floor, yielding a subtly animated visual movement.
Overhead, unadorned fluorescent tubes shine a harsh and unflattering light on the scene. Individual stories in the photographs and texts cover the waterfront — tales of woe, pride, family, despair, friendship, anger, hope, disillusionment and more.
The gallery is painted a midnight blue, which gives the space a hushed aura. (On the day I saw it, others entering the show immediately began to whisper.) The ensemble transforms into a secular church with the assembly line its nave.
On the walls at either end, a large photo blowup focuses on a woman’s worn hands. One hand shows off trinkets that commemorate her work history, the other her GM retirement gold ring. The spine of individual stories links the two. On the side wall between them, an aerial picture shows workers holding signs and standing in a circle around a flagpole outside the factory offices.
The signs read “Drive it home,” part of a last-ditch advertising campaign for the popular, affordable, not especially attractive but soon to be abandoned model of car. Snow covers the ground. It’s a God’s-eye view of wintry stoicism and impending loss.
Off to one side, a small room houses a single bench and the video, projected big on the wall. At first the space seemed too cramped, the huge video projection oppressive, the volume too loud for the workers telling their stories of the factory closure. That sense quickly dissipated, though, as the context shifted the experience.
The little room became a kind of private confessional, adjacent to the “church,” where people on a screen unburden themselves of the complex realities of their situation to people they cannot see.
The video format is akin to that for the still photographs: The stills hang on suspended display walls that leave just a narrow space to accommodate only one or two viewers at a time. You’re physically up close and personal. Going through the lineup, visitors must be mindful of other viewers, adjusting themselves according to movements that are at once communal and individual.
The show was commissioned by the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and its CAAM presentation is in partnership with the USC School of Architecture and Roski School of Art and Design. It comes with a hefty book that chronicles Lordstown events in great detail, mostly in the words of the people in the pictures.
What’s remarkable about Frazier’s installation is the sense of intimacy it’s careful to create — intimacy that is essential to an empathetic understanding of these workers’ quandary. A certain equilibrium arises between viewer and viewed.
That’s not always the case with socially incisive documentary photography, which has long wrestled with an unexpected conundrum. Seeing photographs can be the passive endpoint of the experience, rather than a spur to action. Frazier’s imaginative merger of documentary camerawork with installation art has found an effective formal language to shift the power balance.
‘LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze’
California African American Museum Exposition Park 600 State Drive, L.A.
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As the boundaries of wealth ballooned at the outset of the 21st Century (and continue to do so, worryingly), it was apparently no longer enough for those holding said wealth to boast a considerable art collection. After all, lots of rich people own Rothkos, Picassos and Basquiats – and ten digit bank balances suggested grander possibilities.
Image by Vladimir Partalo
So, naturally, the next logical move would be to own an entire museum…right? And wouldn’t you know, in 2006 PPR (now Kerig) CEO – and husband of Salma Hayak – François Pinault opened his namesake collection at Palazzo Grassi in Venice (betting, of course, that the entire city wouldn’t sink into the Adriatic any time soon – it hasn’t). And certainly not to be outdone, LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault debuted the Frank Gehry designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2014. The trend carried on, as it would, and currently there are a number of others around the globe, most notably the high-profile Broad Museum in Los Angeles, which was inaugurated in 2015, and holds the personal collection of philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad.
Now the news has looped back around to Monsieur Pinault, who has just spent $195 million converting Paris’ former stock exchange building, at 2 Rue de Viarmes in the 1st arrondissement, into the breathtakingly impressive Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection. Part of that budget went to securing the services of the exalted Tadao Ando, whose redesign will surely net its share of cognoscenti column inches – even as the brief age of the “starchitect” begins to wane (when Zaha Hadid passed away in 2016, it arguably lost much of its glitter and frisson).
[…]
One of the greatest virtues of the artistic experience is its ability to open up new horizons…
– François Pinault
The collection itself? Well, such private institutions would tend to reflect the tastes of their founders – and so we get a deeper dive into the aesthetic and philosophical inclinations of Pinault, the art collector. And he wastes no time making a statement, as visitors enter into the awesome neoclassical spectacle that is the Rotonde – its interior starkness punctuated by Urs Fischer’s Untitled, 2011, which completes an artistic circle, as the Swiss provocateur was the first artist granted a solo exhibition at the Palazzo Grassi back in 2012.
The Passage surrounds the Rotonde, the 19th Century bridging to the 21st via Ando’s shuttered concrete wall and staircase. Here, 24 display cases dating back to the 1889 Exposition Universelle are given over to French sculptor Bernard Lavier, famous for his “pop” sculpts of everyday objects like refrigerators and crashed cars. Gallery 3 exalts fine art photography (also a serious concern at the Grassi), and holds the works of such marquee snappers as Cindy Sherman, Berenice Abbott, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn; themes of identity, gender and sexuality are woven into the gallery’s overall narrative.
Altogether there are nine indoor galleries, and an outdoor space displaying Philippe Parreno’s luminous Mont Analogue. No surprise, major art world luminaries fill its halls, Peter Doig, Luc Tuymans, Maurizio Cattelan… It will unquestionably change the face of the Paris art scene, and hastily take its place amongst Europe’s most influential cultural institutions – especially considering the dedication of its benefactor to the cause of art.
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