Blending Photography and Activism
Culture Type
by Victoria Valentine
First Museum Survey of LaToya Ruby Frazier Showcases Array of Photo-Based Projects, Bringing Attention to Communities in Crisis Fighting for Basic Human Rights
LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER, Sandra Gould Ford Wearing Her Work Jacket and Hard Hat in Her Meditation Room in Homewood, PA from On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford, 2017. | © 2023 LaToya Ruby Frazier, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone gallery
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s singular practice is political, poetic, and borne of great passion and a sense of responsibility. Her work unites the art world and working-class communities, bringing attention to the specific experiences of communities in crisis seeking basic human rights, such as access to affordable healthcare, livable wages, and clean air and water.
Frazier grew up in Braddock, Pa., and built her practice around images of her own family, using their generational story, confronting the legacy of the steel industry and related healthcare inequality, pollution, and environmental racism issues, as a foundation for exploring larger narratives about social and economic conditions in other post-industrial communities. Paying homage to Gordon Parks, Frazier has long said she views her camera as a weapon.
By reframing narratives of workers’ movements through a Black feminist lens, LaToya Ruby Frazier promotes recognition of the substantive role that women and people of color have played in labor history across generations.
“LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is the artist’s first museum survey. The exhibition presents special installations of several bodies of work, across photography, text, oral history, moving images, and performance, dating from 2001 to 2024.
The wall text introducing the exhibition, explains that Frazier “revives and preserves unsung histories of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial-era United States. By reframing narratives of workers’ movements through a Black feminist lens, she promotes recognition of the substantive role that women and people of color have played in labor history across generations.”
Frazier gets to know her subjects, primarily women, and gains a deep understanding of the issues and obstacles they are confronting—and what they are doing to overcome the situations or work through the problems—by spending meaningful time on the ground in their communities, workplaces, and homes. She forms a kinship.
Installation view of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y., May 12-Sept. 7, 2024. Shown, The Last Cruze, 2019. | Photo by Jonathan Dorado, Courtesy Museum of Modern Art
The exhibition features more than 100 works. The series on view include The Notion of Family (2001–14), focusing on Frazier, her mother, and grandmother in Braddock; Flint Is Family in Three Acts (2016–20), documenting the water crisis in Flint, Mich.; On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford (2017), bringing attention to the archival efforts of Ford, an artist, writer, and advocate who took photographs and covertly retained documents after mass layoffs at the steel company where she held office positions in the 1980s; and More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland (2022), paying homage to the experiences and essential contributions of healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Installation view of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y., May 12-Sept. 7, 2024. Shown, A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, 2021-2022. | Photo by Jonathan Dorado, Courtesy Museum of Modern Art
“I think it’s important that when people engage my work or think about it that they understand my work doesn’t stop once it’s installed, once it’s on the museum wall, or the gallery wall,” Frazier said when the Baltimore community health workers project was on view at Gladstone Gallery last year. “That is actually where it begins, because then that’s where the social transformation happens. That’s where a cultural exchange will occur between different people that are at different intersections of class in America.”
From the collection of MoMA, The Last Cruze (2019) investigates the fate of workers at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, where production of the Chevrolet Cruz was cut short in 2018 and shifted to other plants. Shown for the first time at MoMA, A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta (2023–24) pays tribute to labor union leader and worker’s rights activist Dolores Huerta, 94, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers union with Caesar Chavez and Philip Vera Cruz.
Installation view of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y., May 12-Sept. 7, 2024. Shown, A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta: The Forty Acres, Arvin Migratory Labor Camp, Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz, Dolores Huerta Peace and Justice Cultural Center, 2023-2024. | Photo by Jonathan Dorado, Courtesy Museum of Modern Art
Eye-opening and informative, the projects shed light on the strengths, struggles, and creative approaches of a variety of groups. On occasion, the subjects get behind the camera, gaining authorship of their own narratives. “I have always been working with other women artists who are not seen as artists or as a part of this art world,” Frazier has said.
Over the past decade, Frazier has received major recognition for her work. Her first book, “The Notion of Family” (2014), was honored with the International Center for Photography Infinity Award. Frazier was the inaugural recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize (2020), which supported the publication of “Flint is Family.” At MoMA, “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity” is accompanied by a new fully illustrated catalog.
When she became a MacArthur Fellow in 2015, Frazier said, “I think that it’s important to use the camera when you’re dealing with these things that we erase and avoid and pretend that aren’t there, and I think it is my job and duty to be a witness to what’s happening.”
Courtesy of: Culture Type
