LaToya Ruby Frazier spent nine months documenting the workers and their families
LORDSTOWN, Ohio (WKBN) – The front cover of a book recently published by LaToya Ruby Frazier was shot from a helicopter two days after the final vehicle rolled off the assembly line at the General Motors Lordstown plant.
Of the 3,000 photos taken by Frazier on the closing of the plant, one of the last Cruze surrounded by the people who drove it off the line and into the parking lot is among her favorites.
“I’m several thousand feet in the air, hovering above it with a 600 mm lens, hanging out the side of the helicopter,” she said.
Frazier spent nine months documenting the workers and their families.
One photo shows Kesha Scales tearing up while hugging co-worker Beverly Williams. Another is of paint shop worker Vickie Raymond sitting on a bed in her parents’ home. There’s also one of the union women’s committee praying before a meeting.
Frazier is from Pittsburgh and a family of steelworkers.
“As an artist and the stories that I like to tell working class heroes are always the theme, the content and the subject matter that I always collaborate with,” she said.
After the New York Times approved her idea of documenting the shutdown, she arrived at the United Auto Workers’ Union Hall across from the plant.
“Met Dave Green and sat down with President Dave Green at the time of Local 1112 and proposed my idea to work in-depth, intimately with him to tell the story from their perspectives and their children,” Frazier said.
The book is not just of pictures, though. A photo of Pamela Brown comes with a detailed writeup about her, as does that of retiree Louis Robinson, Jr.
Frazier also put together a traveling exhibit that is being displayed at museums all across the country.
“So this will permanently stand as a work of art that is a testament of workers as well as a workers’ monument. We can always learn this history and I think we need it now more than ever,” she said.
There have been efforts to bring the traveling exhibit to Youngstown but so far, there are no plans.
Frazier said she never made it inside the plant — General Motors would not allow her access.
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Toward Common Cause to open in summer 2021 with art from 28 MacArthur Fellows
Next summer, to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the MacArthur Fellowships, the Smart Museum of Art will open an expansive multi-venue exhibition that will include the work of 28 MacArthur Fellows.
Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40 is being organized by the Smart Museum in collaboration with more than two dozen exhibition, programmatic and research partner organizations at the University of Chicago and across the city.
Opening in summer 2021, the exhibition will encompass a broad spectrum of contemporary artistic practice, including community-based projects realized in public spaces as well as solo and group presentations in multiple museum, gallery and community spaces. Participating artists include Dawoud Bey, Mark Bradford, Nicole Eisenman, Wendy Ewald, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Gary Hill, Kerry James Marshall, Kara Walker, and Carrie Mae Weems among others.
The full list of artists and more details about the new exhibition are available at towardcommoncause.org.
LaToya Ruby Frazier photographed in Chicago (John D. & Catherine MacArthur Foundation). 2015.
“This project began three years ago with a sense of purpose that has only grown more urgent,” said Abigail Winograd, the MacArthur Fellows Program 40th Anniversary Exhibition Curator at the Smart Museum.
“In the midst of multiple calamities, I have been afforded the unimaginable privilege of working with this group of artists as they met and mentored youth, forged alliances to confront the disproportionate impacts of environmental pollution, and prepared to share their creative vision with all of us across Chicago. Their work has kept me from giving in to despair and offers a daily reminder that there is beauty and goodness in the world, that individual and collective action can change people’s lives.”
Toward Common Cause will use the idea of “the commons” to explore the current socio-political moment, in which questions of inclusion, exclusion, ownership, and rights of access are constantly being challenged across a wide array of human endeavors. It will be realized through collaboration with multiple exhibition sites as well as programmatic partners in neighborhoods across the city.
“Art is a vital social resource, especially in times defined by division, pandemic, and vitriol.” — Abigail Winograd
In addition to the Smart Museum, on-campus exhibition venues will include the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts and the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society. Other planned sites include the DuSable Museum of African American History, the National Museum of Mexican Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Newberry Library.
“The MacArthur Fellows Program is so pleased to support this ambitious exhibition as a way of connecting the work of MacArthur Fellows with local communities in the city of Chicago, MacArthur’s home city,” said Marlies Carruth, MacArthur Fellows program director. “Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, which recognizes and supports creative pursuits across all fields and disciplines, the exhibition will address themes and issues that reach across disciplines and approaches. In the face of today’s unprecedented challenges, Toward Common Cause makes a strong case for the vital role of creative thinking in imagining a better, more equitable future.”
“Toward Common Cause is a profoundly collaborative project and the Smart Museum is thrilled to move beyond its own walls in partnership with these exhibition, program, and research partners across Chicago,” said Amina Dickerson, co-interim director of the Smart Museum. “I hope that the exhibition will foster broader and deeper relationships between artists, institutions, and communities while creating a space for us to reflect on what it means to support a vibrant cultural community for all.”
Additional details about Toward Common Cause—including exhibition dates, visitor information for each venue, related programs, and a full checklist of works and projects—will be made available at a later date at towardcommoncause.org.
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“The ongoing expansion and enrichment of the Museum’s contemporary art collection reflects our deep commitment to bringing diversity, inclusivity, and new narratives to the contemporary art collection.”
The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) announced today its summer and fall contemporary art acquisitions, which include works by Christina Fernandez, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jeffrey Gibson, Edgar Heap of Birds, Kirk Hayes, Earlie Hudnall Jr., Marcelyn McNeil, and Liz Trosper. The artworks, which are wide-ranging in their formal approach, media, and vision, expand SAMA’s growing photography collection and fulfill important mission-driven goals to enhance its holdings of works by women, artists of color, and those living in Texas. The group includes the first two works by contemporary Native American artists to enter SAMA’s collection, furthering its vision to more fully represent the spectrum of voices and perspectives within contemporary art practices. These objects join a group of works purchased earlier in the year by contemporary Latin American artists, including Jose Dávila, Sonia Gomes, Pedro Reyes, and Analia Saban.
“The effort to grow and diversify SAMA’s contemporary art collection is strategically and thoughtfully led by Suzanne Weaver, the Museum’s Interim Chief Curator and The Brown Foundation Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, whose understanding of contemporary artistic practices and long-standing relationships in the art world continue to benefit the Museum exponentially,” said Emily Sano, Co-Interim Director.
Flint is Family, 2016 Video (color, sound) Edition 3/5 11 minutes, 50 seconds LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work examines the confluences of social justice and cultural changes, offering astute commentary on the American experience. Her incisive work, which is informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, includes photographs, videos, and written texts that explore the complicated nature of family, the American healthcare system, industrial pollution, income inequality, race, and many other subjects critical to our national dialogues. The photograph and video entering the Museum’s collection are part of Frazier’s series Flint is Family (2016–2017), which she developed over the course of a five-month period and captures the water crisis in Flint, Michigan and its effects on that community’s residents through intimate and lush imagery. Frazier’s works add an important voice to the Museum’s documentary photography holdings, which include significant works by such artists as Walker Evans, Leonard Freed, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Danny Lyon, and W. Eugene Smith, among others. The work was purchased with funds from the Brown Foundation Contemporary Art Acquisition Fund.
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University of California, Davis Office of Strategic Communications By Karen Nikos-Rose and Michelle Villagomez
LaToya Ruby Frazier calls for a new ‘photo league’ to draw attention to injustices
If an American photo league — like the one-time New York photography cooperative that arose in the first half of the 20th century — ever emerges anew, one can look to the art, ideas and mission of LaToya Ruby Frazier.
In a remote event hosted recently by the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art and other sponsors, Frazier — whose work features voices and perspectives traditionally erased from the American narrative — told her audience about the New York Photo League, who through their art, exposed the struggles of the American working class. She issued a call for action, too.
“I call right now, in this meeting, in this Zoom call, for a photo league,” she said, appearing to lock eyes with each of the more than 220 remote attendees. “We need a rise of a new age of a photo league.” She intimated that a 21st-century photo league would document the contemporary reality of daily life and help make the “invisible visible.”
Frazier was in conversation with Sampada Aranke, Manetti Shrem scholar-in-residence, Oct. 8. The event was one in a series of fall season programs on the museum’s schedule. This talk was co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History’s Art Studio Visiting Artist Lecture Series and Cultural Studies Graduate Group.
Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier showed some of the photos she made on various projects, including this one of a Flint, Michigan, daughter and mother drinking clean water out of a hose. The presentation was offered remotely Oct. 8 as part of a fall series of arts presentations at UC Davis.
Work will be on view at UC Davis
Frazier, who has exhibited all over the United States and abroad, will be one of the many artists on view in the “Young, Gifted and Black” exhibition that will travel to the Manetti Shrem Museum in 2022. In her talk, she showed and talked about the systemic injustices she has captured on camera — images of families that would normally be excluded, including her mother and her. As she put it, her body of work offers “evidence that these individual’s stories deserve to be heard.”
She opened the presentation with a very personal work from her 2014 book, The Notion of Family, that took 13 years to complete. The portraits of her and her mother in this collection depict the artist battling Lupus (a systemic autoimmune disease) while her mother battled cancer, she said, as a result of environmental racism in their community. These photographs didn’t just serve as visual proof of the damage caused by the environmental racism they endured in Braddock, she said, but it also highlighted the bond the photography subjects formed and shared as they lived through the injustices
Initially, by using herself as a subject in the photographs contained in The Notion of Family, she found her voice as an artist — it was then time to go wherever the work took her, she said.
Her approach in her series The Notion of Family led to more documentary work — with communities asking for her to archive their own realities.
A commission from MAC’s Museum in Brussels led her to the city of Borinage where she documented the lives of coal-mining families who had been affected by industrialized labor. Other projects brought her back to her hometown in Pennsylvania. She recorded on camera the experiences of families who lost the only hospital in their community — with the new one being built the next town over.
“That’s the power of doing what the work is asking you to do. That’s the power of me not being afraid that I was an other and an outsider, coming into this village and listening to their grievances and then asking them how they want to be seen, how they want to be represented, and how they can then use that work to correct the wrong.” — LaToya Ruby Frazier
Aranke asked Frazier if there was an image that the artist wanted us to rest on. Frazier smiled, responding by revealing onscreen a powerful photograph from her work from Flint, Michigan, where there has been an ongoing water crisis since 2014. The photo captured a moment shared by a mother and daughter drinking from a hose as the daughter, Frazier explained, took her very first sip of clean water from the tap.
Frazier advised artists in the audience: “After you have established your voice, and you and your history, and your narrative, you have to then mount that as a platform that is then the amplifier for all these other people’s voices that have been silenced and marginalized.”
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The Cavalier Daily University of Virginia by Loree Seitz
Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier shares how art can function for social justice
The University of Virginia’s Department of Art hosted “Art as Transformation: Using Photography for Social Change,” a talk with photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, on Oct. 27. Frazier’s award-winning photo-history book “The Notion of Family” explores the impacts of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied in Frazier’s hometown of Braddock, Pa. From Pennsylvania to Flint, Mich. to the Borinage in Belgium, Frazier’s photography confronts social and political legacies plaguing marginalized groups and reclaims a distinct and thoughtful space for those voices to be recognized and celebrated.
Provoked by her work in “The Notion of Family,” Frazier was invited to the coal mining region of the Borinage in Belgium to document the lives and stories of coal miners and their families in the town. Frazier emphasized the importance of being invited into the community.
“I don’t go anywhere without being invited,” Frazier said.
LaToya Ruby Frazier. Portrait by Steve Benisty.
As an artist, she takes part in a lifelong commitment to her documentary work, seeing her art as bodies of work that lead to her next body of work, instead of viewing her work as segmented, individual projects.
As a guest of the town, Frazier spent hours getting to know community members, noting in particular her interactions with three male coal miners that she photographed in a statuesque manner juxtaposed to the trees in the background. She explained how her work layers together portraits, still lifes and landscapes to create one narrative about the community and its inhabitant’s lives.
“Documentation and being present with people and honoring that and making it very large, there’s a lot of power in that,” Frazier said. “Their memories become an imprint in their own mind, these are living works of art.”
Frazier described artists as standing in the gap between the working class and the creative class, underscoring the importance of understanding an artist’s role in both institutions and communities. She noted an artist’s responsibility to expose the nation’s failures and shortcomings through art, explaining “we should be a part of those that love them so much we are willing to tell the truth.” To reckon with the intense relationship between the artist and society, Frazier urged audiences to use James Baldwin’s “The Creative Process” as their personal manifesto to consider the appropriate role of an artist to critique society and facilitate change. Baldwin sees artists and society as lovers, with the mission to reveal the society’s true nature and make freedom real.
The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago
The Renaissance Society is pleased to announce the forthcoming release of The Last Cruze, a substantial book that expands upon LaToya Ruby Frazier’s 2019 solo exhibition at the museum. Available to order, this publication features Frazier’s extensive body of work that centers on the autoworkers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Through photographs and interviews, Frazier records the devastating effects on the workers’ families and their community after GM “unallocated” the plant, which soon led to its closure.
The developments in Lordstown brought widespread attention to the small Rust Belt town, which emerged as a political flashpoint. As the final days of production at GM Lordstown approached in 2019, the employees were faced with the difficult decision to either transfer to plants in other parts of the country or lose their pensions and benefits. For many, this meant uprooting or dividing their family, moving away from aging parents, or leaving behind their support networks. During this long period of upheaval, Frazier spent part of every week in Lordstown with the workers and their families. Photographing them and letting them tell their own stories, she conveys their experiences of these events, the disruption to their lives, and the efforts of the local union, United Auto Workers Local 1112, on behalf of its members.
Front and back covers of LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze, 2020. Design: David Khan-Giordano. Photo: Useful Art Services.
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. It includes the exhibition’s more than sixty black-and-white photographs and documentation of the immersive installation at the Renaissance Society. Just as vitally, the book includes five in-depth discussions, each led by Frazier: dialogues with union leaders from UAW Local 1112 and members of its Women’s Committee, and conversations with economic geographer David Harvey; Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage; and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Julia Reichert and Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown. Providing greater context, the book also includes new art-historical essays by Coco Fusco, Benjamin J. Young, and exhibition co-curators Karsten Lund and Solveig Øvstebø, as well as a detailed timeline compiled by Frazier and UAW members tracking the history of unionism in the US, from the 1930s onward. The volume closes with a reflection by Werner Lange, a sociologist who staged a 45-day roadside vigil in solidarity.
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 year 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.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze 392 pages / 87 color plates, 124 halftones Hardcover, 12 x 9 inches Edited by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Karsten Lund, and Solveig Øvstebø. Designed by David Khan-Giordano.
With contributions by Pamela Brown, Sherrod Brown, Coco Fusco, LaToya Ruby Frazier, David Green, David Harvey, Werner Lange, Karsten Lund, Marilyn Moore, Lynn Nottage, Solveig Øvstebø, Julia Reichert, Rick Smith, Frances Turnage, and Benjamin J. Young.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze is supported by Mirja and Ted Haffner, The Hartfield Foundation, The David C. & Sarajean Ruttenberg Arts Foundation, Barbara Bluhm-Kaul and Don Kaul, and Mary Frances Budig and John Hass. Publication supported by Conor O’Neil / Chauncey & Marion Deering McCormick Foundation.
All Renaissance Society publications are made possible by The Mansueto Foundation Publications Program.
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