The Creative Independent
From a conversation with Daniel Sharp

Visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier on the value of photography, the billboards she made for the ENOUGH of Trump campaign, the collaborative process of photographing Breonna Taylor’s family, and why art is intrinsically political.

Two pieces you made for the Enough of Trump Campaign will go up as billboards in swing states before the 2020 election. One of them pairs COVID-19 with air pollution. Another is a picture of Donald Trump with superimposed names of Black bodies murdered by the police. Can we go through these and describe what we’re looking at?

My artistic practice—and personal life—is focused on environmental justice issues, healthcare, and equity. I can’t avoid my own background and where I come from. We know that the industrial Heartland of America plays a significant role in our elections. I will never get over the fact that Hillary had that election stolen from her. And part of the reason had everything to do with States like my home state, Pennsylvania. It had everything to do with the arrogance of that campaign to decide not to come and speak to working-class Americans, not to come to speak in the Rust Belt, not to speak to blue-collar workers.

I wake up every day thinking about Black people being murdered by the State. We live in a police state. We are constantly under siege. And in addition to being under siege in this very visible way of being gunned down or placed in a chokehold or a knee on the neck, there’s a slow violence of pollution and toxicity that are invisible silent killers surrounding Black bodies.

We are biological creatures, organisms, connected to our environment. For multiple generations, we’ve been redlined to sacrifice zones contaminated by industrial and fossil fuel corporations. The United States Steel Corporation has broken many of the EPA regulations that have been put in place, and the Trump administration had the audacity to allow them to release more chemical emissions. Compound that with the COVID virus, it is inhumane.

When we talk about America, Andrew Carnegie, and industrial prosperity, we must remember that his first factory, The Edgar Thomson Steel Works, depicted here in the billboard runs along the ancient Monongahela river. This is native Indigenous land. This is the same site where the Battle of the Monongahela was fought in 1755. This land where this industrial polluter is located is already sitting on massacres and bloodshed and we keep failing to see that. For me, my photographs are like an excavation. They’re a visual archeological dig that I’m trying to put up and show people that all of this permeates within us.

I think a lot about the difficulty of discussing environmental racism because it doesn’t get headlines and gets sidelined. It’s only over time that you see these anti-environmental policies build up until you realize your river is polluted, right?

Yeah, and it’s so polluted, and then your governor denies democracy, vetoes your vote, and the next thing you know you’ve got lead contaminated water with Legionella bacteria inside of it coming into your homes and going into the mouth of your children, right? So this is serious. And it must be visualized.

Like on a billboard.

Right. It has to be put up large for people in these particular states to see that this is your choice. This is why you must act. Imagine, you’re in your car, sitting in traffic, polluting the air with your fossil fuel vehicles; nonetheless, you are in your car in traffic. Most people like to drive to clear their mind. If they see this billboard and if they see this connection—especially if they have lost a loved one who has given up their health to work in steel mills and coal mining and fossil fuel companies—if they see this, it should move them to act. I fundamentally believe that is the role of an artist, especially when we are facing a crisis like this.

I have a lot of late-millennial friends who feel disillusioned by the Democratic Party, including myself. But you’re right that this cannot be a tit for tat. This is a life or death.

I had never photographed a politician in my life. Never wanted to. But when the opportunity came to photograph Stacey Abrams, I made room in my overbooked schedule to go photograph her. I believe in this woman, her vision, what she’s been called for, the fact that she’s fighting for fair voting. The fact that she is carrying on that legacy, that so many people died for just so we could vote. We have to get back to these fundamental core values that have been removed from us because of white supremacy, fascism, and a blatant disregard for humanity and human life. This is our dignity and soul at stake—but let’s not get it twisted. After I proudly vote for the Democratic Party, I will be writing letters and protesting Biden and Harris if they don’t do right by the poor, and the working people of this country.

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Courtesy of: The Creative Independent

Art in America
By: Rachel Wetzler, Associate Editor

The Realist movement begins in earnest with an image of work.

Contemporary artists have adopted strikingly different approaches to contend with the instability of twenty-first-century economic life. Some have responded through a kind of abstraction of work itself, focusing instead on its evolving infrastructure: Liam Gillick’s generically modernist plexiglass-and-aluminum structures that allude to the utopian aesthetics of de Stijl, the Bauhaus, and Constructivism as they trickle down into the bland placelessness of the service economy cubicle; Yuri Pattison’s networked environments, like “user, space” at Chisenhale Gallery in 2016, a mock coworking space replete with slick minimalist office furniture, air-filtering plants, and computer-controlled smart lighting; Simon Denny’s installations that mimic displays at tech industry conferences and trade shows.

Another response has been to reflexively engage with the precariousness of “artist” as a profession. In the practices that art historian Julia Bryan-Wilson describes as “occupational realism,” artists unable to make a living in the field with which they professionally identify have recast the day jobs they take on out of necessity as artwork, emblematized by a project like Ben Kinmont’s Sometimes a nicer sculpture is being able to provide a living for your family (1998–ongoing), in which Kinmont’s actual, income-generating bookselling business doubles as a long-term endurance performance. For Bryan-Wilson, such works are “realist” in multiple senses: on the one hand, paid labor is really performed, not merely mimed or acted out; at the same time, these performances articulate the multiple, shifting identities and self-identifications characteristic of precarious workers in general.

Over the past several years, however, an increasingly prominent group of artists, including Aliza Nisenbaum, Jordan Casteel, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Kevin Jerome Everson, have taken up the aesthetic conventions and formal traditions of realism, returning, in various ways, to the quintessentially realist form of the worker portrait. Though they engage knowingly, and in many cases overtly, with the realisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these portraits are far more ambivalent about the portrayal of labor than their predecessors, as if registering the shifting ground of work today.

[…] photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier’s series “The Last Cruze” focuses on deindustrialization and its aftershocks, illustrating what happens when the bottom finally falls out in a factory town—in this case, Lordstown, Ohio, whose economy had long revolved around a General Motors plant that most recently produced the compact Chevy Cruze. In November 2018, Dave Green, the president of Local 1112 of the United Auto Workers was informed by GM management that the Cruze line was being discontinued and the plant would be “unallocated,” a bureaucratic workaround that allowed GM to effectively close the factory without violating its union contract: the plant would not technically shut down, it just wouldn’t have anything to make, and thus no need for any workers. After the announcement went public that Lordstown and four other GM plants would be unallocated, the company’s stock price immediately shot up; meanwhile, the employees were faced with the wrenching choice of accepting offers of relocation to other GM plants, often hundreds of miles away from their homes, or staying put and hoping for the best, giving up their pensions and benefits.

Frazier documented the weeks leading up to the final Chevy Cruze rolling off the line in March 2019 and regularly returned to Lordstown for several months after, taking portraits of the workers and their families. The photographs are paired with text panels drawn from interviews she conducted with the sitters, in which they discuss their histories with the company, their anger—or resignation—in response to the closure of the factory, their anxieties about leaving friends and family behind. Though a selection of the photographs and interviews was originally published in the New York Times Magazine in 2018, Frazier takes care to distinguish what she is doing from photojournalism, with the position of detached objectivity that designation implies: “The Last Cruze” is an expression of solidarity from someone who has seen firsthand the social and economic wreckage a factory closure leaves behind. Frazier was born and raised in the former steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania; her first major series, The Notion of Family (2001–14), extrapolated from autobiography, using her own family as embodiments of disinvestment in the Rust Belt and its consequent postindustrial deterioration.

[…]

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Courtesy of: ARTnews.com

TED Radio Hour
By NPR/TED Staff

We need water to live. But with rising seas and so many lacking clean water — water is in crisis and so are we. In this TED Radio Hour, speakers explore ideas around restoring our relationship with water.

Part 2 of the TED Radio Hour episode Our Relationship With Water

Flint, Michigan is the site of one of the worst ongoing water crises in recent U.S. history. Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier has spent years capturing the stories of life living with toxic water.

WALLING: This is LaToya Ruby Frazier.

FRAZIER: When we all wake up in the morning, the first thing you’re going to do is get in the shower, right? The second thing you’re going to do is brush your teeth. Well, imagine what that feels like when you can’t do that.

ZOMORODI: LaToya is a visual artist and a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Much of her work focuses on the lives of working-class families in the Rust Belt.

FRAZIER: When I first arrived in Flint the summer of 2016, there were well over 29,000 homes that were impacted. And I think that’s what struck me the most – which is where Shea Cobb and her mother, Ms. Renee, and her daughter, Zion, who were 8 years old at the time, they were living in the midst of this.

ZOMORODI: Shea is also an artist and a school bus driver. And LaToya spent several years with Shea, her mother, Renee, and her daughter, Zion, documenting their lives in Flint.

FRAZIER: Yeah. I remember the first time I met Shea. It was quite beautiful. We met at a diner, her favorite diner, called Captain Coty’s, where she liked to go get buttermilk pancakes at the end of her school bus route in the mornings. And upon meeting each other, sitting down in the booth just looking at each other, it felt like a double portrait in a way. You know, she’s in her early 30s and a really diligent, hard-working artists. And so I felt that it was my responsibility to document and cover what it’s been like, you know, raising her daughter during this ongoing water crisis.

ZOMORODI: For people who maybe don’t quite understand exactly what Shea’s day-to-day life was like without having easy access to water – because it’s not like you could just boil the water in Flint, right?

FRAZIER: Well, the water quality was so bad that she couldn’t inhabit her family home at 303 Mary Street. When I arrived, she was living in another apartment with her mother. And, you know, the water contamination was so severe that she couldn’t brush her teeth. You know, you take a shower and brush your teeth. Well, with contaminated water, you can’t do either of those two things.

SHEA COBB: We get a bottle of water. And we waterfall it. You brush your teeth. You spit it out. You waterfall your bottle. And you brush some more. We don’t ingest the water on any level.

FRAZIER: You know, one of the standout images in the photo essay is seeing Shea pouring water from a plastic water bottle into Zion’s mouth to gargle with it. And I shoot it with a fast shutter speed so that it freezes the water drop just before it touches Zion’s tongue. And you see the toothbrush at the bottom right-hand part of the frame – so brushing her teeth with bottled water, having to bathe with bottled water, having to cook or not cook at all.

COBB: Since the water situation, I’m discouraged to cook in my house and use my kitchen. We’ll go out to eat. And we’ll eat on the outskirts of the city.

FRAZIER: We would go to a restaurant called Badawest to eat dinner there. And even there, you know, they were serving glasses of water. And, you know, Shea would never drink it. And she would forbid Zion to drink it.

COBB: The Flint River is toxic, has been toxic for years. Fecal matter in the Flint River, toxic chemicals and waste dumped in the Flint River. We know not to drink out the Flint River. We won’t swim in it. We don’t mess with it. We don’t even like the smell of it. When it get hot outside, downtown Flint, you can smell the Flint River. It stinks. Why would we drink it?

FRAZIER: It is 2020. This started six years ago. Flint might not be headline news any longer. But the water crisis is still going on. We can’t forget about the men, the women and children and the families in Flint. […]

Listen here…

Following the Flint Is Family project, Frazier partnered with AWG Contracting and Moses West to bring an atmospheric water generator to Flint so that residents could produce their own supply of clean water. It is in its second year of use.

Courtesy of: NPR / TED Radio Hour