Smudging the Line Between Art and Activism

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
The New York Times Style Magazine
by Hanya Yanagihara

Do artists have a duty to directly confront the injustices and inequalities around them?

Anyone who’s read this magazine over the past four years knows that one of the things we’re most interested in here at T is what an artist’s relationship is to the world around her. Is there a line between who she is as a citizen, and who she is as a creator? Is it her responsibility to explicitly address the injustices and inequalities she sees? And if so, what does “explicit” mean here? Does an artist — should an artist — possess a greater sense of moral urgency? Should she consider her work advocacy?

Contact sheets for photographs included in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s book “The Last Cruze” (2020), with notes from the artist in purple. Photo: Naima Green

All of us who are artists, or whose professional lives involve the observation and chronicling of them, have asked these questions of ourselves: not just in these past few years, though, perhaps, with increasing frequency during them. In my own creative life, I prefer to come at things sideways, and yet it’s because of that approach that I find myself admiring people like LaToya Ruby Frazier. Frazier, 39, is a photographer, but really, her practice is as much about her medium as it is continuing in the tradition of her philosophical forebears — visual artists such as Rick Lowe, Joseph Beuys, Dorothea Lange, Faith Ringgold and Sue Coe; writers such as Larry Kramer, Upton Sinclair and Arundhati Roy — people who smudged the line between activism and art. Their work awakened their viewers and readers to abuses of human rights, to the stigmatization of people with AIDS, to the desperation of the poor. Their art was what they produced, but their legacy was the change they helped effect.

Like them, Frazier has spent the majority of her adult life creating an increasingly ambitious body of work that chronicles the people who have been disappointed or betrayed by America: the residents of Flint, Mich., made to consume and bathe in contaminated water because of a 2014 cost-cutting measure; the autoworkers of General Motors, facing a shutdown of their Lordstown, Ohio, plant. In doing so, writes Zoë Lescaze in her profile of Frazier, she has created 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.” Her work, Lescaze says, is an act of patriotism: “I am showing these dark things about America because I love my country and countrymen,” Frazier says. “When you love somebody, you tell them the truth. Even if it hurts.”

And maybe that, finally, is what an artist’s role is, no matter her medium or her message: to tell the truth. Not everyone will want to hear it — perhaps not in your lifetime; perhaps not ever. But you say it because you must. You can’t make people listen. But you can make it harder for them to turn away.

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Courtesy of: The New York Times Style Magazine

Heartbreak and Resurrection in ‘Grief and Grievance’ at the New Museum

New Museum
Art Review
by Jerry Saltz

The New Museum’s show “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” finds terrible beauty in the pain, rage, mania, and sorrow that form the continuing psychosis of this country’s obsession with race.

Featuring 37 Black artists working in the United States from 1964 to today, it plumbs the long American night of racism with an eye on the poetics of abstraction, the possibilities of monochrome, and the documentation of bare facts. Together, these 97 pieces suggest Black artists have made the most important art of our time.

It’s notable that this exhibition, with its themes of mourning and loss, was the last organized by the great Nigerian-born, Germany-based curator Okwui Enwezor, a visionary pioneer of international multiculturalism, who died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 55. Part of the big global art world that self-started in the early ’90s, Enwezor’s animating purpose as a curator seemed to be to declare a war on the apartheid within the institutional art world, which simply left artists from Africa out of exhibitions. Above all other curators of his generation, Enwezor brought contemporary African art and history to bear on the whole world, and he was unabashed about wanting power so that he could effect change. The show was incomplete at his death and has ably been brought to fruition using notes from and conversations with Enwezor by curators Naomi Beckwith and Massimiliano Gioni, artist Glenn Ligon, and independent curator-writer Mark Nash.

Enwezor’s curatorial eye centered on an erotics of form, color, and structure; even the most difficult or didactic work in this show is packed with its own intellectual and visual pleasure. Unlike with similar exhibitions, you will not spend your time laboring over gassy wall texts. The U.S.-based artists Enwezor worked with are now well known, and that can make this show feel a little orthodox and official in its selections — until you remember, of course, that he helped bring many of these people to light. There are important artists Enwezor has previously highlighted not included here, including David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Wangechi Mutu, and Gary Simmons; he may not have thought their work fit the theme, although we will never know. For Enwezor, what was most important was always how well artists worked with subject matter, rather than the “goodness” of the subject matter itself.

Doctor's Offices

[…]

Photography was perennially one of Enwezor’s strongest suits. This show includes LaToya Ruby Frazier’s extraordinary documentary photographs of three generations of Black women whose lives are bound to the boom-and-bust fate of the industrial town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the home of what was once a massive steel mill. The work, made in the aughts, conjures that of social-photographic geniuses Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange, among others — Frazier is that great. Braddock and its people were left for dead; Frazier captures the normalcy of life there — how people come to live with and take care of themselves in the face of national neglect.

Dawoud Bey’s series “The Birmingham Project” gets at what happens when white America intercedes more overtly. It is made up of black-and-white diptych portraits that make explicit the toll of the KKK’s 1963 murders of four black girls in a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church. On one side of each diptych, we see a black child who is the same age that one of the murdered children was in 1963; on the other side is a portrait of an adult who is the age that child would have been today. This heartbreakingly stripped-down idea turns infinite: Every person who is killed loses not only everything they have but everything they were ever going to have. Bey’s chasm of sorrow becomes almost bottomless.

“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” is on view at New Museum, 235 Bowery, through June 6.

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Courtesy of: Vulture

BOOK LAUNCH: THE LAST CRUZE

The Renaissance Society
Saturday, February 27, 2021
The discussion will be conducted on Zoom. Click here to register.

In conjunction with Printed Matter’s Virtual Art Book Fair, LaToya Ruby Frazier joins curators Karsten Lund and Solveig Østebø for an in-depth discussion of The Last Cruze, a substantial new book that expands upon her 2019 solo exhibition at The Renaissance Society.

Featuring the artist’s extensive body of work that centers on the workers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, The Last Cruze records the devastating effects on the workers’ families and their community after GM “unallocated” the plant, which soon led to its closure. For Frazier, this publication is a vital part of The Last Cruze, extending the dialogue around the work, offering another platform for the workers’ voices, and inviting new reflections by a number of leading scholars and thinkers.

While the GM plant in Lordstown has officially closed and its workers and their families have largely had to relocate, it’s clear this story is hardly over. The ripple effects of the closure are only starting to be seen. And in the time since The Last Cruze was first exhibited in Chicago, the COVID-19 pandemic has devastated the economy and underlined just how precarious things are, and continue to be, for so many people. The importance of advocating for workers, the need for good healthcare, the blessings of community, and the power of collective action are now more palpable than ever. Building on the original exhibition and gathering LaToya Ruby Frazier’s ongoing dialogues around these topics, this book presents The Last Cruze in an expanded form, filled with voices from Lordstown and beyond.

Live captioning will be available for this event.

Courtesy of: The Renaissance Society

The discussion will be conducted on Zoom. Click here to register.

LaToya Ruby Frazier in Conversation with Margot Norton at the New Museum

New Museum
Friday, March 12, 2021

Join a conversation with artist LaToya Ruby Frazier in dialogue with New Museum curator Margot Norton.

In conjunction with the exhibition “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” the New Museum is honored to host this conversation series and highlight the practices of artists participating in this exhibition.

This program will be presented via Zoom, register for this online program here.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby holding her babies, from the series, The Notion of Family, 2002. Gelatin silver print, 19 ½ x 23 ½ in (49.5 × 59.7 cm)
Courtesy of the Artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.

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Courtesy of: New Museum

This giant exhibit at the New Museum explores racist violence in America

TimeOut New York
by Anna Ben Yehuda

Browse through the works of 37 Black artists while walking around the “Grief and Grievance” exhibit.

“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America,” a new exhibition that has taken over almost the entirety of the New Museum and is set to stay put until June 6, explores the history of racist violence all throughout the United States.

Back in 2018, curator Okwui Enwezor began working on the project, hoping to mount it by last year’s Presidential election. Unfortunately, the curator’s passing in 2019 and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic forced a shift in plans that delayed the show’s opening to last week.

In total, the work of 37 Black artists currently fills the museum’s lobby, its three main viewing floors, the building’s exterior and the South Gallery found in the building next door.

Expect to browse through the amazing works of artists the likes of Kara Walker, who is the brain behind an entire wall filled with sketches and drawings; LaToya Ruby Frazier, who contributes over a dozen photographs from her “The Notion of Family” series; and Jean-Michael Basquiat, whose “Procession” can be glanced at as soon as the elevator doors open on the third floor.

The show is a powerful one, with images ranging in style, theme and scope, but one that is necessary to delve into today more than ever. Given COVID-19-related guidelines, visitors have to purchase timed tickets ahead of their trip.

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Courtesy of: TimeOut

The art of processing our collective grief

CNN Style
Oscar Holland, CNN

We have heard the phrase “grim milestone” so often in the past year that it now falls into the realm of journalistic cliché.

Monday’s news that the US has surpassed half a million Covid-19 deaths should not, however, be any less poignant for its morbid familiarity.

These are the moments in which individual and shared grief intersect. But as we struggle to take stock of societies’ losses, what does coming to terms with grief, as a culture, really look like?

Whether portraying others’ grief or revealing their own, artists are often able tap into something universal. One need not be Christian to feel Mary’s anguish in Renaissance depictions of Christ’s crucifixion; one need not have lived through the Spanish Civil War to feel the harrowing abyss at the heart of Picasso’s “Guernica” (pictured above). The torment of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream” is clear to all.

The New Museum in New York City explores this idea of processing grief through art with painfully appropriate timing. Just days before Monday’s Covid-19 milestone, it opened the new exhibition, “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America.” In another cruel twist, the show’s mastermind, Nigerian curator and critic Okwui Enwezor, died before its opening following a long battle with cancer.

The show was, however, conceived before the emergence of Covid-19. (Enwezor passed away in 2019, though he might well have predicted how a pandemic would disproportionately affect people of color.) It instead addresses racial injustice and, in the late curator’s words, “black grief in the face of a politically orchestrated white grievance.”

Doctor's Offices
LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Professional Building Doctors’ Offices from the series The Grey Area (2010–2012)

In the exhibition, memorial and commemoration take many forms. In “Peace Keeper,” Jamaican artist Nari Ward covered a full-size hearse in tar and feathers. Rashid Johnson’s living installation, “Antoine’s Organ,” meanwhile presents plants and various household items (including shea butter and books chronicling the experiences of the African diaspora) in a commentary on the nature of life and decay. Elsewhere, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs of working-class hardship and Julie Mehretu’s abstract landscape paintings all struggle with loss in their own unique ways.

These varied responses to the show’s central premise — that grief is irrevocably woven through the Black experience in America — are both personal and, by virtue of their exhibition, inherently public. Artistic creation is often an act of both private catharsis and solidarity.

Audiences interpret the creators’ grief through the lens of their own, and thus individual suffering is communicated to society as a whole. Culture may not cure, but it can soothe.

“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America“ runs until June 4 at the New Museum in New York.

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Courtesy of: CNN Style