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.
Courtesy of: The Royal Photographic Society
The New York Times
Fine Arts & Exhibits special report
By Geraldine Fabrikant
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.
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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.”
Courtesy of: The New York Times
Los Angeles Times
Art Review
By Christopher Knight, Art Critic
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.
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.
(213) 744-7432
caamuseum.org
Courtesy of: Los Angeles Times
BlackBook
Arts & Culture
By Ken Scrudato
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.
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).
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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.
[…]
Courtesy of: BlackBookMag.com
48hills
Independent San Fransico news + culture
By Caitlin Donohue
“Do you have any answers for me?” asks LaToya Ruby Frazier’s mother in “Detox (Braddock U.P.M.C.),” the 2011 video piece the artist contributed to “Contact Traces” (through June 6), a show by California College of the Arts curatorial practice graduate students.
She’s far from the only one with the question. We’re coming up on the milestone of 60 percent of San Franciscans over 16 being fully COVID-vaccinated. But pressing issues lie strewn about us, half-discarded in the sprint to brunch again.
Questions like: What about the rest of the world? President Biden has indicated his support for waiving COVID patent restrictions, but the US sits on a large stockpile of the shots that could be sent to our neighboring countries—or better yet India, where the coronavirus death rates are as high as we’ve seen anywhere, at any time. You can’t beat a global pandemic with one-country solutions. Haven’t we learned anything from the last year and change?
Even if you find a way to look past global inequity and the possible development of new virus strains, it remains to be seen how workers from many industries will bounce back after their devastation by the pandemic. And what of the isolation-caused skyrocketing rates of local overdose deaths?
And on, and on. It’s a dizzying array of concerns whose overwhelming variety appears to be echoed in “Contact Traces,” which revolves around the concept of “care” as a potential avenue out of this mess.
Her largely Black community has fallen into disrepair after the closure of the steel mill that once employed workers, and “Detox” examines the public health fall-out from the community’s airborne exposure to the mill’s heavy metals.
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Courtesy of: 48hills.org
The New York Times Style Magazine
by Zoë Lescaze
When General Motors announced plans to slash its domestic work force in 2018, company stock soared 5 percent. LaToya Ruby Frazier, a Chicago-based artist whose photographs and videos champion unsung members of the working class, was furious. She decided to embark upon a new series devoted to the autoworkers who were contending with the possible loss of their plant in Lordstown, Ohio; they would be the subject of an upcoming exhibition and a published photo essay. But before any of that could happen, the workers had to agree to let her into their lives. Frazier traveled to their union hall and sat in the foyer as the members filed in for a big meeting that would begin with a vote on her. She was both astonished by their diversity — they were young and old, Black and white, male and female — and aware that she wasn’t necessarily welcome. “As a Black woman, I know what it feels like when someone’s eyes rest on me in a hostile way,” she said. “And I think they have a right to do that. … You’re being told awful news that is going to destroy your livelihood, your income, your family, your community. These people were not in a good mood when I got there.” The doors closed and Frazier waited, heart pounding, while Local 1112 of the United Auto Workers union decided whether to grant her unprecedented access.
The vote was a unanimous yes. The doors opened and Frazier strode inside with four cameras slung across her chest and shoulders. She immediately dropped to the floor and began crawling around the perimeter of the hall, capturing the expressions of anguish, confusion and disbelief written on the faces of people whose lives were falling apart.
“I am showing these dark things about America because I love my country and countrymen,” she said. “When you love somebody, you tell them the truth. Even if it hurts.”
Frazier’s radical empathy has brought her to places whose occupants have every reason to distrust outsiders. She photographs communities gutted by unemployment, poverty, racism and environmental degradation, seeking out subjects dehumanized or ignored by the mainstream media. At 39, she sees her life’s work as an archive of humanity, one that particularly documents the courage and diversity of blue-collar workers and the consequences of the policies that condemn them to struggle. For her, this is what it means to be a patriot. “I am showing these dark things about America because I love my country and countrymen,” she said. “When you love somebody, you tell them the truth. Even if it hurts.”
Socially conscious artistic practices may be in vogue these days, but Frazier goes beyond hollow claims of “raising awareness” with an essay in a magazine or a show at an art museum. She is the rare photographer who approaches relationships with her subjects as lifelong commitments, and who tries to make substantial, material differences in their lives. Frazier’s conviction in art that involves — and transforms — entire communities aligns her with Rick Lowe, an artist who, with his collaborators, famously converted an underserved swath of Houston into a nexus for housing, art programming and neighborhood development activities. She also carries on the legacy of the German artist Joseph Beuys, who believed that participatory art could heal society. Frazier, though, pursues these conceptual ideals while still producing formally elegant images using traditional techniques. Working mainly with a medium-format camera and black-and-white film, her intimate domestic portraits and expressive landscapes are classically beautiful, even when they depict harrowing realities. Making photographs as poetic as they are political is, for Frazier, a way of honoring her subjects. “She doesn’t pop in and pop out,” said the artist Carrie Mae Weems, Frazier’s friend and early mentor. “These are long-term projects that deeply matter, not only to her but to the community and, ultimately, I think, to the nation.”
This fall, Frazier will publish “Flint Is Family in Three Acts,” a record of her five-year collaboration with people affected by the ongoing contaminated-water crisis in Flint, Mich. “The Last Cruze,” a formidable and moving volume of portraits and interviews with the autoworkers, was released in December. “If you take the work seriously, it changes how you see people,” said the artist Doug DuBois, another friend and mentor, who taught Frazier at Syracuse University. Her work has the power to propel viewers “from empathy to activism,” he said. “If you get it, you’re going to get angry.”
Frazier herself is fierce, prone to eloquent, impromptu diatribes on oppression in its many forms, from Reaganomics to redlining. She wears gold-rimmed glasses and her hair in an Afro, a look she describes as “militant nerd.” And she’s funny — quick to find the dark humor in bleak situations. A few years ago, when a doctor told her that lupus, an incurable autoimmune disease, had rendered her skin photosensitive to the point where she can’t safely go outside on sunny days or even sit under fluorescent lights, she couldn’t help but laugh. “So I’ve become one with my medium?” she asked, her raspy voice incredulous. “I’m cracking up. He doesn’t think it’s funny, but it’s like, how ironic.”
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Courtesy of: The New York Times Style Magazine
