Reflections on Home, Family, and Representation

Glasstire
by Jessica Fuentes

Review: Diaries of Home at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

I’m a 41-year-old woman and for most of my life the adults around me — educators, mentors, family — have given me the same consistent advice, “Whatever you do, don’t get pregnant.” As an adolescent I was baffled by these words because having children was not an interest or priority to me — it felt like the adults around me didn’t know me at all. As a young adult, I was incredulous, as I saw it, it was my life and I would prioritize what was important to me. Even now (yes, I still get this advice), I scoff at the desire others have to voice their opinions about any person’s decisions on when (if at all) to start a family and how many children to have. 

With age, I have come to at least empathize with the advice these well-meaning adults have tried to share. Yes, having children necessarily requires your life to shift — it is a physical, emotional, financial, life-long commitment. As an artist and single parent, having children has meant that some experiences are off the table for me. But, my children add much more to my life than I could explain in words. As their parent, I strive to shape them but in turn, they shape me as well. Often, my children appear in my art and in my writing, and even when they aren’t directly referenced, their spirit is there because they have changed my understanding of the world various times over. It’s like Octavia Butler wrote in Parable of the Sower, “All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you.” 

It is with the weight of this lifelong advice about children and the act of balancing my decision to have a family and continue my artistic practice, that I walked into Diaries of Home at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and felt understood and validated as an artist and mother in a way that no other exhibition has done. Co-curated by Andrea Karnes, the museum’s Chief Curator, and Clare Milliken, Assistant Curator, the show features pieces by 13 women and nonbinary artists working in photography and lens-based media to explore concepts of home, family, and community. Beyond my personal connection to the content in the show, as a photographer, I also appreciated the variety of photographic approaches presented.

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LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Home on Braddock Avenue” 2007

LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Home on Braddock Avenue,” 2007, gelatin silver print, 20 x 24 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s more documentary-style photographs of her hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania, and scenes from Flint, Michigan fill a large gallery in Diaries from Home. Her series The Notion of Family was created from 2001 to 2014. Like Dugan’s Family Pictures, Frazier’s series documents three generations. Frazier presents the everyday moments and ordinary details that make up the lives of her grandmother, her mother, and herself. These images are juxtaposed with photographs of desolate scenes around the town, including a dilapidated building and a pile of rubble, together the body of work critiques the systemic and systematic issues faced by Black communities.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Zion Doing Her Math Homework"

LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Zion Doing Her Math Homework from the International Academy of Flint (Est. 1999), Flint, Michigan,” 2016–17, gelatin silver print, 20 × 24 inches. Courtesy of the Artist and Gladstone Gallery. © LaToya Ruby Frazier

Frazier’s series Flint is Family, includes images taken from 2016 to 2021 detailing the lived experiences of the community as a result of the water crisis that began in April 2014, when the City of Flint switched its water source from Lake Huron to the Flint River. The photographs on view show students and community members awaiting the arrival of President Barack Obama, reference the continuation of daily moments like completing homework with water bottles ever present, and document the arrival of the atmospheric water generator, a temporary solution to the ongoing problem.

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Beyond the artists I’ve mentioned, Diaries of Home includes works by Patty Chang, Nan Goldin, Deana Lawson, and Laura Letinsky. The exhibition covers a lot of ground and beautifully shifts between photographic and lens-based styles, showcasing traditional documentary and portraiture while also bringing in video works and AI-generated imagery. Presenting a range of styles is necessary in a photographic show because often the medium is viewed in confined and formal ways, when in reality there are many working to push the form in innovative directions. 

The show also builds on the Modern’s 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women, by showcasing women and nonbinary artists, perspectives that have historically been left out of the art canon and other official records. Highlighting these artists in turn provides much needed representation of the varying experiences of female-identifying and nonbinary people, which creates counter-narratives to the socially constructed ideas that are prevalent around gender. These images and accounts capture moments of happiness, love, playfulness, strength, nostalgia, discomfort, loneliness, and struggle. They fill in nuances and reveal deeper truths about the past, present, and future in terms of family, home, and community. More than anything, Diaries of Home validates that there are a myriad of ways to live and document our lives, while reminding us that home is where we make it and with whom we make it. 

Diaries of Home is on view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth through February 2, 2025.

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Courtesy of: Glasstire

Baltimore Museum of Art Celebrates 110th Anniversary

Culture Type
by Victoria Valintine

Paying tribute to the vast talents of artists John Akomfrah and LaToya Ruby Frazier and civil rights lawyer Sherrilyn Ifill with inaugural awards was the highlight of the evening.

artists LaToya Ruby Frazier and John Akomfrah; and Sherrilyn Ifill

The Baltimore Museum of Art’s Ball and Party honored artist LaToya Ruby Frazier; artist John Akomfrah; and BMA Trustee, civil rights lawyer, and scholar Sherrilyn Ifill. | Photo by Maximilian Frazier


THE BALTIMORE MUSEUM OF ART (BMA) hosted a gala celebration on Nov. 23. The BMA Ball and Afterparty marked the institution’s 110th anniversary and launched new awards of recognition. The state’s political elite showed their support. Maryland Governor Wes Moore and First Lady Dawn Moore served as honorary co-chairs, along with former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke and Patricia Schmoke, M.D. Former Governor Martin O’Malley and Katie O’Malley were also among the guests.

More than 400 people attended the ball and an additional 200 came out for the after party, according to the museum. Among them were many Baltimore-connected artists, including Jerrell Gibbs, Devin N. Morris, Amy Sherald, SHAN Wallace, and Derrick Adams and John Waters, who are both BMA trustees.

Paying tribute to the vast talents of two artists and a civil rights icon was the highlight of the evening, which included remarks, dinner, dancing, and dessert. British Ghanian artist and filmmaker John Akomfrah and artist, photographer, and advocate LaToya Ruby Frazier received the first-ever Artists Who Inspire Awards.

Board of Trustees Chair James D. Thornton, artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, Baltimore Museum of Art Director Asma Naeem, and artist John Akomfrah

From left, Board of Trustees Chair James D. Thornton, artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, Baltimore Museum of Art Director Asma Naeem, and artist John Akomfrah. | Photo by Maximilian Frazier


Akomfrah’s films are studies in contrast, aesthetic masterpieces that beautify challenging histories with mesmerizing images and evocative soundtracks. A co-founder of Smoking Dogs Films, he generally makes single-and multi-channel films exploring memory, migration, post-colonialism, climate change and the African diaspora. Akomfrah represented Great Britain this year at the 60th Venice Biennale.

Inspired by her own experience growing up in a steel town, Frazier’s work focuses on communities in crisis struggling for basic human rights. BMA is currently presenting an exhibition of Frazier, a MacArthur Fellow (2015) who was born in Braddock, Pa., and lives and works in Chicago. “LaToya Ruby Frazier: More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022” is on view through March 23, 2025.

The inaugural Changemaker Who Inspires Award was bestowed upon the venerated civil rights lawyer, scholar, and BMA Trustee Sherrilyn Ifill. After serving as president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, from 2013 to 2022, Ifill returned to academia. She taught at Harvard Law School, was a scholor-in-residence at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2023-24), and joined Howard University. Ifill is the inaugural Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Esq. Endowed Chair in Civil Rights at Howard University Law School, where she established the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy.

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Courtesy of: Culture Type

The Art World Explores Concrete Ways to Fight Climate Change

New York Times
by Alina Tugend

Museums, galleries and other art institutions are looking for measures to reduce their environmental footprints.

Visitors to the Hammer Museum’s show “Breath(e) Toward Climate and Social Justice” will be greeted by powerful works portraying the widespread impact of ecological degradation: photos of citizens in Flint, Mich., waiting for clean water, a painting of a fish created out of spilled crude oil and contaminated sediment.

But increasingly, museums are realizing that presenting artwork that addresses the climate crisis is not enough — they also must consider their own impact on the environment.

So, Hammer visitors won’t know that most of the art items were shipped by ground or sea, rather than air, resulting in far less carbon dioxide emissions. Or that the exhibition catalog was printed using FSC paper, which comes from forests managed in sustainable ways, and wrapped in translucent paper rather than the typical plastic shrink wrap.

“It would absolutely be hypocritical for us to put on a show about climate change without questioning our implication in climate change,” said Glenn Kaino, a Los-Angeles-based conceptual artist and co-curator of the show, which runs through Jan 5.

A photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier titled “Moses West Holding a ‘Free Water’ sign on North Saginaw Street between East Marengo Avenue and East Pulaski Avenue, Flint, Michigan.”Credit…via LaToya Ruby Frazier and Gladstone Gallery


The Hammer exhibition is part of “PST Art: Art and Science Collide,” a series of events taking place through mid-February 2025 at about 70 museums, science institutions and other spaces across Southern California.

Museums and galleries have long shown artworks related to the climate crisis, but in recent years, there has been more of an urgency for directors and curators to look at the environmental cost of heating, cooling and lighting their buildings and packing, shipping and exhibiting their shows. That also includes examining the ecological toll of using imported materials or artists from distant shores rather than local artwork and artists.

In part, the pandemic jump-started the process; people had time to think about issues that were pressing but difficult to focus on during the busyness of everyday life. Within the art community, discussions arose about collaborative actions geared toward the climate crisis.

What would it “look like to actually be able to come together and feel like we are empowered to do something — and imagine a future we can live in, rather than feeling this kind of existential dread?” said Laura Lupton, an art and climate consultant, who helped develop and coleads the Climate Impact Program that is part of the PST Art event. She co-founded the nonprofit Artists Commit in 2020.

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Courtesy of: New York Times

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity

Brooklyn Rail
by Kamora Monroe

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an enigma, but her subjects are definitely not.

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s installation The Last Cruze, 2019, at The Museum of Modern Art

Installation view: LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2024. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.


A comprehensive exhibition of Frazier’s work over the years, titled Monuments of Solidarity, is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art. Comprehensive is almost an understatement; this exhibition covers over one hundred pieces across seven bodies of work from 2003 to 2024. No stranger to MoMA, Frazier has been in two previous exhibitions there—as well as many other group and solo shows throughout the world.

There is a free-flowing quality to the exhibition as each gallery smoothly transitions to the next. Even so, each room has a unique lighting, color, and setup that evoke different emotions. The first gallery I saw, subtitled “The Last Cruze,” consisted of bright red headboard-like structures towering single-file in front me, in a formation like that of a train track. Trains and beds are often things one can sleep on, but—in this exhibition—I found my eyes peeled for each lengthy story I had to trudge through. Each structure displayed a union worker’s photo and their story. The room itself was a grayish blue all over. The straight line of fluorescents above cascaded down on the red structures, the rest of the room dimly lit and adopting an eerie quality instead, which wasn’t helped by the closeness of the red structures. A small, beige room draped in a yellowish fluorescent lighting, which held the project titled More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021–22 (2022), evoked a feeling of sterility. The room contained the stories of community health workers, with their images and stories placed on moving structures that looked like hospital monitors. My eyes traced the bottom of the structures—falling upon the sight of unlocked wheels. I flirted with the idea of moving these monitors, perhaps toying with the chronology and its impact, but this desire quickly faded—the sterile lighting negated my buoyant thoughts. Next, I passed into a room with a rounded shape, entrapping itself with walls lined with collected paperwork, cyanotypes, and color photographs demanding the viewer’s full attention. With abrupt lighting changes, I was intoxicated by its constant conceptual motion. Then, I found calm. The final galleries were more underwhelming in their layout, composed of neutral-toned walls and standard museum lighting, which was almost a saddening sight. However, everything was quickly redeemed by the content in such a small space. It was as though you could fit all the pieces in a small loft. Kind of tight but not jarring or overly fussy.

Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, MoMA

Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2024. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.


As I made my way back into the blue-gray room with the beaming fluorescent lights, it was almost ironic how the largest image in the room was the easiest to miss. As my head swiveled, almost falling off of my neck in doing so—my feet led me left. Through a slew of people, I was sucked into a 2019 photo of Marilyn Moore from Frazier’s The Last Cruze installation, bound on the wall. Immediately, my eyes were drawn to the hands. This photo was duplicated at both ends of the gallery, and it was as though I could hear its call in both my ears at once. Hands crossed, left over right—experiences crash into one another, yet remain calm: a testament to perseverance. The subject looks relaxed—almost slouching in her seat. It’s not in a way that denotes bad posture, but rather comfort, that it would be painful to sit differently. The photo is extremely sharp, allowing the viewer to see each detail, down to the wrinkles, ridges in the nails, and each divot in her rings. The image evokes a kind of nostalgic and sentimental quality: nostalgic because these hands remind me of my grandma’s, carefully smoothing and twisting my hair as a child; sentimental because the wrinkles denote experience in life. I imagine the rings on Marilyn Moore’s fingers on a stack, like my grandmothers—and her lightweight jacket coming from the front closet nearest to the door. I imagine she never forgets to put the chain on the door. I imagine the wooden table that those hands rest on smells of Old English wood cleaner. This image plays on portraiture, yet redefines it in that it de-emphasizes the need for faces, and places emphasis on an entirely new part of the subject. I got the spitting image of my grandmother without even seeing Moore’s face.

Photo of hands

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Marilyn Moore, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee and Retiree Executive Board, (Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co., Lear Seating Corp., 32 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, Assembly Plant, Van Plant, Metal Fab, Trim Shop), with her General Motors retirement gold ring on her index finger, Youngstown, OH from The Last Cruze, 2019. © 2023 LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy the artist and Gladstone gallery.


These may be Frazier’s Monuments of Solidarity, but I argue they are also the opposite, in that she works to retain an intimate bond between the viewer and the subject by making their story part of the work itself. In some ways, this factor turns its head away from the monumentality of the exhibition, in that the texts do not allow room for the photos and their subjects to speak for themselves. The necessity of reading in conjunction with viewing the photo takes away from having a natural experience and mental conversation with the subjects. I came out of the exhibit more knowledgeable on people’s stories and lives in different times of hardship, but at times the influx of information obscured the experience of viewing the photograph, especially as the works approached more recent years. I would have liked to converse telepathically with the subjects and perhaps see their stories, as opposed to reading them in large blocks of text shifted to the right side. However intimacy is never the enemy, I find—and I believe that these stories are necessary to platform, by any means. The importance of a viewer’s ability to more easily resonate with the subjects of the photo is underscored in Moments of Solidarity, as Frazier ensures that she platforms commonly unfamiliar faces in art spaces. Although, for me—her subjects aren’t so unfamiliar.

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Courtesy of: Brooklyn Rail

Breath(e): Toward and Climate and Social Justice

Flaunt Magazine
by Julia Zara

Time is of the Essence in this PST ART Initiative at the Hammer Museum

We measure everything in time—the hours left in a flight, the minutes remaining for our pasta to boil, the seconds until a workout is over—with eyes glued to the timer. As time dwindles down and our anxious waiting is either gratified or exacerbated by the release of the bells, it’s only a matter of nanoseconds until we grasp the clock yet again, setting another timer for the next task, the next deadline, the next cutoff. We wait, we time, and we move on.

However, there exists a certain group of time watchers who don’t move on. Climate activists from Elizabeth Wanjiru Wathuti to Greta Thunberg remind the world that time is crucial and of the essence in the race against climate change. And plastered above New York City’s Union Square is a blaring red reminder that time, as we know it, is running thin: in fact, as this post goes live, the Climate Clock reads that there’s four years and 343 days until climate change becomes irreversible.

Breath(e): Toward and Climate and Social Justice—a group exhibition at the Hammer Museum presented with Conservation International, a global nonprofit dedicated to sustainability—is one such diligent observer of time and the elements. Showcasing artists using environmental art practices to address the climate crisis and anthropogenic disasters, Breath(e) taps into the intertwined relationship between equity and social justice. As a participating exhibition in the Getty Museum’s region-wide PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative—which will see collaboration between 818 artists and 50 exhibitions in Southern California—Breath(e) displays over 100 artworks by 25 international artists alone.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zion Taking Her First Sip of Water from the Atmospheric Water Generator with Her Mother Shea Cobb on North Saginaw Street between East Marengo Avenue and East Pulaski Avenue, Flint, Michigan, 2019. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta. 30 × 40 in. (76.2 × 101.6 cm). © LaToya Ruby Frazier; Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.

Curated by artist Glenn Kaino and guest curator Mika Yoshitake, Breath(e) will take over the Hammer Museum like breath itself, blowing life into the fight against climate change and reigniting the cause through art. Featuring commissioned works by artists Mel Chin, Ron Finley, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Garnett Puett, and Lan Tuazon, the multidisciplinary exhibition advocates for a nonhierarchical perspective on climate change that’s influenced by ancestral indigenous knowledge—where natural materials are a rudimentary family, not mere receptacles for human consumption. Commissioned pieces, including full-scale garden installations and bee-degraded sculptures, will be presented alongside uncommissioned works such as Mika Tajima’s New Humans II, a piece that uses machine learning to activate an undulating pool of black magnetic liquid, and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint is Family, a photo series that depicts the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Even so, there’s still time to see the exhibition. Breath(e) will be on view at the Hammer Museum from September 14, 2024 to January 5, 2025.

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Courtesy of: Flaunt Magazine

BMA to present ‘More Than Conquerors’

Baltimore Fishbowl
by Ed Gunts

Baltimore’s Community Health Workers are the subject of an art installation that the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) will present starting in November, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s installation entitled More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022. 

LaToya Ruby Frazier. More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022. 2022. Installation view: LaToya Ruby Frazier, Gladstone Gallery, New York, March 2 – April 15, 2023. Commissioned by Carnegie Museum of Art for the 58th Carnegie International and funded in part by National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship, 2021-22. © LaToya Ruby Frazier, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.


Featuring a series of portraits and related narratives mounted on stainless-steel IV poles, the installation documents and celebrates the essential work performed by Baltimore’s Community Health Workers during the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Frazier’s work was commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art for the 58th Carnegie International in 2022 in Pittsburgh, where it was installed and won the Carnegie Prize.  The Carnegie International is North America’s longest-running international art show. Funded in part by a National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship, More than Conquerors was shown at the Gladstone Gallery in New York from March 2 to April 15, 2023. It is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through September 7.

The BMA acquired the work in the spring of 2023, with support from the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, and will show it from November 3, 2024 to March 23, 2025. The Baltimore installation marks the first time that it will be on view at the museum and in the city that inspired it.

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Courtesy of: Baltimore Fishbowl