In Photos of Flint and of Health Care Workers, LaToya Ruby Frazier Updates American Iconography

Art In America
by Shameekia Shantel Johnson

Since the early 2000s, Frazier has enlisted photography to transform everyday people and community organizers into statuesque figures.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme from The Notion of Family, 2008

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Momme, 2008


There’s nothing more American than the idioms capturing the pride of hard work and individuality, the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and “burning the midnight oil” slogans that drape us in the archetype of the solo pioneer. Our country’s ethos often feels like a byproduct of the ad-man age, teeming with nostalgia for a time when everything was American-made, when labor was synonymous with working-class pride rather than exploitation. In “Monuments of Solidarity,” LaToya Ruby Frazier’s first museum survey, on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through September 7, we see the artist fashion new grammars of American identity, ones that are being formulated now, in the postindustrial boom.

Since the early 2000s, Frazier has enlisted photography to transform everyday people and community organizers into statuesque figures. Her tender portraits evoke a dedication to world-building that centers around a love ethic. Most importantly, seeing Frazier’s expansive artworks in the near collapse of an empire calls attention to the fallacies of American hubris: that our country may never tremble, or more arrogantly put, that a single leader might keep us afloat.

It’s bittersweet to acknowledge that the best art comes from moments of indelible pain. That is how we are introduced to Frazier’s work: at the start of the exhibition, we meet a teenage Frazier who trains the camera on herself, and on the matriarchs in her family. She orients our gaze towards three generations of women all experiencing the repercussions of poverty and ecological contamination in the industrial town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Images and videos from her illustrious series, “The Notion of Family”—which she worked on for more than a decade between 2001 and 2014—are suspended in the air or glittered along the lavender walls that frame the predictable gentleness of feminine youth against the harsh realities of social, economic, and environmental dispositions. The black-and-white gelatin silver prints are presented on a modest scale that strikes the perfect balance between intimacy and immediacy. In Momme (2008), a petite double portrait of Frazier and her mother, Cynthia, their faces eclipse one another, aligning in such a way that they appear as one person. Self Portrait (United States Steel), 2010, pairs a color video diptych of Frazier nude from the waist up with reels of smoke from a Braddock factory looming in the air. Here, we witness the symbiotic relationship between her vulnerable body and our sickly landscape, both suffering from the chemical ills of capitalism. “The Notion of Family” is grounded in metaphors of decay, mirrors, and lineage, weaving autobiography with public investigation, a combination that remains consistent throughout her practice.

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

View of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s installation The Last Cruze, 2019, at The Museum of Modern Art.
Photo Jonathan Dorado/Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York


Seeing Frazier’s magnum opus of a series unfold throughout these first galleries helps solidify the importance of her legacy right away. It’s always a pleasure revisiting the catalyst that bore the beloved artist-activist, as it is an honor to glide throughout the exhibition and see how her work grew more refined in the series that follow.

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Courtesy of: Art in America

LaToya Ruby Frazier on Lee Friedlander’s Ohio Factory Valley Series

“I can speak through photographs about how I feel about my lived experience in America and pay homage to people who are also everyday working people.”

A photographer finds “healing” in the representation of Black working-class histories.

Photographer and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier sees the legacy of the Black women of America’s working class in Lee Friedlander’s “Ohio Factory Valley” series. Through her personal memories and close observation, these lesser-known photographs become “knockouts” that empower the women they depict.. On the occasion of her timely exhibition “Monuments of Solidarity” at MoMA, Frazier traces the trajectory of documentary photography, from these two inspiring photographs to her approach of collaborative “visual healing.”

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Courtesy of: The Museum of Modern Art

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments to Workers

by Lovia Gyarkye
Hammer & Hope

The artist works with her collaborators to try to “invert and redistribute wealth and power.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier headshot by Eric Hart Jr. for Hammer & Hope
LaToya Ruby Frazier at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, June 20, 2024. Photograph by Eric Hart Jr. for Hammer & Hope.

On a cool evening in May, LaToya Ruby Frazier gathered with friends and strangers in a basement theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The communion was a public event tied to the artist’s new exhibition, Monuments of Solidarity, surveying more than two decades of photographic work. After a brief introduction by the curator Roxana Marcoci, Frazier walked over to a podium at the front of the room. She wore a blue silk suit, and her hair, a dark brown mass with sandy highlights, was styled into an afro. The artist looked like a figure pulled straight from Barkley L. Hendricks’s ethereal portraits.

“I’ve used my camera as a compass to direct a pathway toward the illuminated truth of the indomitable spirit of working-class families and communities in the 21st century,” Frazier said, reading from a recent essay. “For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist — one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time — historical erasure and historical amnesia.”

This essay, which is printed in full at the beginning of the exhibition catalog, defined the center of the evening’s program, “A Credo on Solidarity,” which included a suite of creative responses to Frazier’s philosophy from other artists and scholars. The poets Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan performed spoken word, reading a long poem from a large brown scroll they unfurled onstage. Sandra Gould Ford, an artist, educator, and former steelworker, presented a slideshow illustrating Frazier’s thesis with photos, quotes and videos. There was sound art, featuring June Jordan’s 1982 poem “Moving Towards Home,” by Shala Miller; a biographical essay by the scholar Imani Perry; and an affecting dance by the video and performance artist Liz Magic Laser and her mother, the choreographer and dancer Wendy Osserman.

These pieces not only embodied the ideas in Frazier’s credo — subjectivity, power, art as a means of healing — they also testified to a critical component of the artist’s work. At the heart of Monuments of Solidarity is the artist’s devotion to collaboration. Frazier was raised Baptist, and her faith is a clarifying tool for understanding her practice. She believes in empathetic listening and frequently cites agape love — a Christian idea that promotes selfless and unconditional care for others — as a principal tenet. Like James Baldwin, whom the artist counts among her influences, Frazier positions herself as an interlocutor, someone “called to stand in the gap between the working class and creative class communities.”

Several of the participants in “A Credo on Solidarity” had made images with her before. Frazier met Cobb and Hasan while working on Flint Is Family in Three Acts (2016–20), a study of the government-made water crisis in the beleaguered Michigan city. She and Ford collaborated on the series On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford (2017), which featured Frazier’s photographs alongside Ford’s images to tell the story of labor conditions in a steel manufacturing company in Pittsburgh, Pa. By forging enduring alliances with her subjects — collaborating on art projects, designing a profit-sharing model that funnels resources back into the community, and giving people in the photographs final say on any accompanying text — the artist has upended the conventional dynamics of documentary photography. Her images are historical correctives that dignify working-class communities previously denied such recognition.

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

Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado/MoMA.


“It’s always been a dream of mine to have a museum of workers’ thoughts,” Frazier, 42, told me two weeks before her communion of collaborators at MoMA. “What would it look like if there were monuments erected for workers and their families and their descendants instead of industrial capitalists?” We were sitting in a nondescript room in the museum, surrounded by tokens of a muted office life — dusty windows, an empty desk — and signed copies of Frazier’s exhibition catalog. In just a few days, her sprawling exploration of workers past, present, and future would open to the public.

Monuments of Solidarity, on view through Sept. 7, comes at an energizing time for the U.S. labor movement. From UPS drivers to Hollywood writers and actors, workers have won big contracts that guarantee higher wages, better health insurance, and stronger job protections. Even though union density remains stubbornly low, a majority of Americans support unions and more than half a million employees participated in hundreds of strikes across the country in 2023. Frazier’s show meets the demands of this moment by sharing the lessons of recent labor rights actions and presenting a record of contemporary civic engagement more generally. From chronicling how the local United Auto Workers union in Lordstown, Ohio, protected employees impacted by the General Motors plant closure to showing Flint residents using innovative technology to procure clean water for themselves, Frazier’s images affirm how crucial collaboration and information exchange among the working class is to liberation work. “I’m concerned with getting the general public more knowledge about certain laws and policies that are impacting our basic human rights,” Frazier said. “We don’t have time to wait on our elected officials or mass media to tell the right stories or the full truth.” Viewers are encouraged not only to identify with other workers but also to connect the dots of their oppression and, eventually, enact change in their own communities.

Across the exhibition’s eight rooms, Frazier has erected monuments composed of photographs, extensive first-person testimonies, video projections, and audio pieces that detail how people in the United States survive government negligence and corporate greed. They span the length of her career, from the deeply intimate images of her mother and grandmother to her homage to the labor activist Dolores Huerta. The artist choreographs objects in each room, arranging the images, text, and video and sculptural and architectural installations to encourage different kinds of meditation. “The way she has rethought both conceptual and documentary art practices to create what is truly an artistic activist practice is what attracted me to her,” Marcoci said of Frazier and her work. To the curator, this exhibition is “not about representing people exclusively through [Frazier’s] lens, but through their own testimony.”

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Courtesy of: Hammer & Hope

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monument to Empathy

Hyperallergic
by Zoë Hopkins

Though Frazier’s photography is often described as “documentary,” it betrays a thorough investment in and interchange with those she photographs.

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) (all photos Zoë Hopkins/Hyperallergic)


Two hands, finely wrinkled and thick at the knuckles, rest one atop the other, gathered together in quiet elegance. They express a keen sensitivity to style: five fingers are ornamented with rings. One of these, worn on the right index finger, is a gold General Motors retirement ring. As I look at LaToya Ruby Frazier’s carefully arranged photograph of these hands, and become fixated on this singular element, this portrait of adornment and self-fashioning expands into a record of the industry that these hands sustained. The ring is indeed imbued with beauty and honor, but it also directs my attention subtly toward fraught questions about the labor it commemorates, and to the sinister reality of the industrial factory. The image conveys the beauty and dignity of these hands, as well as the things they labored over; it pays homage to their work while refusing to reduce them to it. 

These hands belong to Marilyn Moore, a UAW 1112 member who worked at General Motors for 32 years. Frazier met Moore while working on The Last Cruze, the artist’s 2019 photo series made in collaboration with members of UAW Local 1112 and 1714 based in Lordstown, Ohio, as they fought against the closure of their GM assembly plant. Moore’s portrait is among the last images in Monuments of Solidarity, a survey of Frazier’s work currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art. 


Frazier’s photographs reveal an eye that is at once tender and probing: they stare unflinchingly at the collusion between post-industrial capitalism, environmental racism, and class disenfranchisement, while illuminating with solicitous regard the strategies of refusal and resistance that working-class communities (most of them Black and Brown) have developed in response. Though her photography is often described as “documentary,” it betrays a thorough investment in and interchange with those she photographs that makes it difficult to buy into this designation. Crystal and urgent moral and political clarity breaks through Frazier’s work. Her images are conceived in and through a relational ethic that stretches beyond empathetic storytelling — each photo sutures Frazier to the people she photographs, and their shared struggle to render a more livable world for those ensnared in racial capitalism.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Mom Making an Image of Me” from the series The Notion of Family (2008)

The show begins with Frazier’s earliest work, The Notion of Family (2001-2014), a series shot in the raw interior of her family life in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Braddock, which was once a mighty steel-industry town, has today morphed into a hotbed of economic devastation, toxic pollution, and consequent medical crises after being abandoned by its purveyors of industry decades ago. These circumstances come hurtling into view in works like “Landscape of the Body (Epilepsy Test)” (2011), a diptych that juxtaposes an image of Frazier’s mother hooked up to a hospital machine with one of the ruins of the demolished University of Pittsburgh Medical Center hospital. (It closed in 2010, leaving patients like Frazier’s mother without a local hospital.) 

Such images of injustice mingle with portraits of familial entanglement and resemblance like “Momme” (2010). Here, Frazier gazes head-on at the camera, while her mother is pictured in profile, eyes closed. Their noses and chins meet, drawn together like puzzle pieces. The photo, which already has a quietly affective sting, delivers a heavy emotional blow when read against the image of the artist’s mother in the hospital. Over the course of the exhibition, Frazier’s metaphorical aperture widens from her family to her community, and then to other communities across the United States that have contended with struggles similar to those of Braddock’s residents. Frazier is no outsider looking in; rather, she begins with what she carries inside her and works outward from there. 

LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Landscape of the Body (Epilepsy Test)” (2011)


The exhibition’s title, Monuments of Solidarity, turns on two words that singe with the heat of today’s political climate. It conjures questions underlying the contested idea of the monument in the 21st century. The recent memory of racist monuments across the United States cascading down from their plinths comes flaring up in the mind’s eye. 

Though Frazier’s photographs don’t explicitly take on these themes, they hum in the background of works like “Flint Is Family Act III” (2016) (note the titular echo of A Notion of Family). Here, Frazier’s photographs of people affected by the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, are mounted on metal frames and installed in the middle of the gallery like miniature billboards — or monuments. The portraits are paired with transcribed excerpts of oral interviews with each sitter. It is in this dovetailing of the photographic and textual narratives that we might conceptualize a monument, or perhaps a counter-monument that rebukes the messaging sold by monuments to people like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick, for example, both of whom amassed their vast fortunes from Pennsylvania steel mines. 

Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Flint is Family in Three Acts (2016) 


Frazier’s most dramatic gesture to the monument is in The Last Cruze — the same series to which the aforementioned photograph of Marilyn Moore belongs. A hulking, bright orange metal structure stretches across one of the galleries like an elongated, industrial rib cage; black and white portraits of Ohio UAW members are installed throughout the structure, where they are once again paired with narrative testimony about their struggles against General Motors. 

The words that bubble up as I navigate this massive sculpture feel somewhat at odds with one another. The structure itself is powerful, titanic, overwhelming, but the photographs are poignant and caring, and deeply reflective of a spirit of solidarity. I begin to wonder: Can the form of the monument, which has so long served to reinforce hierarchy and the authority of the individual, be reconciled with a photographic practice that is so rooted in an ethos of horizontality and collectivity? Or does the struggle that is waged in Frazier’s photographs require a different vocabulary, one that refuses the symbolic heroics of the monument? What, I wonder, becomes possible when we recognize that solidarity might not need the grammar of the monument at all? 

Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Last Cruze (2019)


LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity continues at the Museum of Modern Art (11 West 53rd Street, Midtown, Manhattan) through September 7. The exhibition was organized by Roxana Marcoci, David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator, with Caitlin Ryan, assistant curator, and Antoinette D. Roberts, former curatorial assistant, Department of Photography.


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Courtesy of: Hyperallergic

Blending Photography and Activism

Culture Type
by Victoria Valentine

First Museum Survey of LaToya Ruby Frazier Showcases Array of Photo-Based Projects, Bringing Attention to Communities in Crisis Fighting for Basic Human Rights

LaToya Ruby Frazier - Sandra Gould Ford Wearing Her Work Jacket and Hard Hat, 2017

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER, Sandra Gould Ford Wearing Her Work Jacket and Hard Hat in Her Meditation Room in Homewood, PA from On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford, 2017. | © 2023 LaToya Ruby Frazier, Courtesy the artist and Gladstone gallery


LaToya Ruby Frazier’s singular practice is political, poetic, and borne of great passion and a sense of responsibility. Her work unites the art world and working-class communities, bringing attention to the specific experiences of communities in crisis seeking basic human rights, such as access to affordable healthcare, livable wages, and clean air and water.

Frazier grew up in Braddock, Pa., and built her practice around images of her own family, using their generational story, confronting the legacy of the steel industry and related healthcare inequality, pollution, and environmental racism issues, as a foundation for exploring larger narratives about social and economic conditions in other post-industrial communities. Paying homage to Gordon Parks, Frazier has long said she views her camera as a weapon.

By reframing narratives of workers’ movements through a Black feminist lens, LaToya Ruby Frazier promotes recognition of the substantive role that women and people of color have played in labor history across generations.

“LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York is the artist’s first museum survey. The exhibition presents special installations of several bodies of work, across photography, text, oral history, moving images, and performance, dating from 2001 to 2024.

The wall text introducing the exhibition, explains that Frazier “revives and preserves unsung histories of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial-era United States. By reframing narratives of workers’ movements through a Black feminist lens, she promotes recognition of the substantive role that women and people of color have played in labor history across generations.”

Frazier gets to know her subjects, primarily women, and gains a deep understanding of the issues and obstacles they are confronting—and what they are doing to overcome the situations or work through the problems—by spending meaningful time on the ground in their communities, workplaces, and homes. She forms a kinship.

Installation view of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y., May 12-Sept. 7, 2024. Shown, The Last Cruze, 2019. | Photo by Jonathan Dorado, Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

The exhibition features more than 100 works. The series on view include The Notion of Family (2001–14), focusing on Frazier, her mother, and grandmother in Braddock; Flint Is Family in Three Acts (2016–20), documenting the water crisis in Flint, Mich.; On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford (2017), bringing attention to the archival efforts of Ford, an artist, writer, and advocate who took photographs and covertly retained documents after mass layoffs at the steel company where she held office positions in the 1980s; and More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland (2022), paying homage to the experiences and essential contributions of healthcare workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Installation view of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y., May 12-Sept. 7, 2024. Shown, A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, 2021-2022. | Photo by Jonathan Dorado, Courtesy Museum of Modern Art

“I think it’s important that when people engage my work or think about it that they understand my work doesn’t stop once it’s installed, once it’s on the museum wall, or the gallery wall,” Frazier said when the Baltimore community health workers project was on view at Gladstone Gallery last year. “That is actually where it begins, because then that’s where the social transformation happens. That’s where a cultural exchange will occur between different people that are at different intersections of class in America.”

From the collection of MoMA, The Last Cruze (2019) investigates the fate of workers at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, where production of the Chevrolet Cruz was cut short in 2018 and shifted to other plants. Shown for the first time at MoMA, A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta (2023–24) pays tribute to labor union leader and worker’s rights activist Dolores Huerta, 94, a co-founder of the United Farm Workers union with Caesar Chavez and Philip Vera Cruz.

Installation view of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, N.Y., May 12-Sept. 7, 2024. Shown, A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta: The Forty Acres, Arvin Migratory Labor Camp, Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz, Dolores Huerta Peace and Justice Cultural Center, 2023-2024. | Photo by Jonathan Dorado, Courtesy Museum of Modern Art


Eye-opening and informative, the projects shed light on the strengths, struggles, and creative approaches of a variety of groups. On occasion, the subjects get behind the camera, gaining authorship of their own narratives. “I have always been working with other women artists who are not seen as artists or as a part of this art world,” Frazier has said.

Over the past decade, Frazier has received major recognition for her work. Her first book, “The Notion of Family” (2014), was honored with the International Center for Photography Infinity Award. Frazier was the inaugural recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book Prize (2020), which supported the publication of “Flint is Family.” At MoMA, “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity” is accompanied by a new fully illustrated catalog.

When she became a MacArthur Fellow in 2015, Frazier said, “I think that it’s important to use the camera when you’re dealing with these things that we erase and avoid and pretend that aren’t there, and I think it is my job and duty to be a witness to what’s happening.”

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Courtesy of: Culture Type

‘I’ve Used My Camera as a Compass’

Cultured Magazine 
by LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier Shares the Tenets Behind Her Practice—and First MoMA Show

As her exhibition “Moments of Solidarity” opens for previews, the artist-activist shares her accompanying credo exclusively with CULTURED. Here, Frazier outlines the origins, timelines, and influences behind the 23 years of work on view in the expansive show.

Photo of LaToya Ruby Frazier by Sean Eaton. Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art.

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Photography by Sean Eaton. Image courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art.


I am not a carbon copy of anyone, just as you are not a composite of your mother, father, grandparents, siblings, or extended relatives. The self-portrait you see—the image of your presence—will be the life you live. Part of the root of the word photograph is phōs, which means “light” or “to shine.” It appears also in the ancient Greek word phōsphóros, which means “bearer of light” or “bringer of light.” To photograph means to draw with light. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

In 1982, I was born by the ancient Monongahela River in Talbot Towers, an Allegheny County public housing project in a neighborhood known as “the Bottom” in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Shaped by the steel industry and the legacy of the nineteenth-century industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, it is home to his first steel mill, the Edgar Thomson Steel Works (1875), and his first library, the Braddock Carnegie Library (1889).

From the Steel Valley, along the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio rivers to the Flint River in “Vehicle City,” Flint, Michigan; from historical mineshafts in the Borinage, Belgium, to a historic labor union in Lordstown, Ohio; and from community health workers in Baltimore, Maryland, to a labor leader and civil rights activist in California’s Central Valley, I’ve used my camera as a compass to direct a pathway toward the illuminated truth of the indomitable spirit of working-class families and communities in the twenty-first century.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie, from The Notion of Family, 2010. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier. All artwork images courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.



For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo-essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and historical amnesia.

My spiritual bondage to Braddock was broken the instant light exposed my film’s silver halide crystals as I created United States Steel Mon Valley Works Edgar Thomson Plant (2013), hovering over the city with a bird’s-eye view. Permeating the twenty-first-century postindustrial landscape were the vestiges of imperial war, patriarchy, and the death and destruction of nature. Braddock is a namesake of the British general Edward Braddock, who was defeated and mortally wounded at that site in the Battle of the Monongahela in 1755. George Washington, who served as one of Braddock’s aides-de-camp, had earlier witnessed the onset of the imperial war between Great Britain and France—the French and Indian War of 1754–63.4 John Frazier, who aided Washington, served in expeditions against the French. A plaque at the Edgar Thomson Steel Works marks the spot where his cabin once stood.

In the triptych John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie (2010), which includes a picture my Grandma Ruby took of me, I pose a question: Weighed against the two colossal Scotsmen that dominate Braddock’s history, what is the value of a Black girl’s life?

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Grandma Ruby, Mom, and Me, from The Notion of Family, 2009. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier.


On the same battlefield, two and a half centuries later, I created a self-portrait, Grandma Ruby, Mom, and Me (2009), standing inside Watt’s Memorial Chapel. It is evident to me that we are fighting not only a physical war but a spiritual one. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for You are with me.

Self Portrait October 7 (9:30 a.m.) (2007) documents my battle with lupus. Like photosensitive film and paper, the medications make me light sensitive. I’m one with my medium.

Huxtables, Mom, and Me (2008) is awareness of the American caste system and conflicted social mobility. The first thing an artist finds out . . . before he or she has had enough experience to begin to assess his or her experience . . . is a kind of silence. For reasons he cannot explain to himself or to others, he does not belong anywhere.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme, from The Notion of Family, 2008. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier.


Momme (2008) is a refusal to remain silent about the abuses I could no longer endure within my matrilineage. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. When life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back.

The artist is distinguished from all other responsible actors in society—the politicians, legislators, educators, scientists, et cetera—by the fact that he is his own test tube, his own laboratory, working according to very rigorous rules, however unstated these may be, and cannot allow any consideration to supersede his responsibility to reveal all that he can possibly discover concerning the mystery of the human being.

Born Again of Water and Spirit, Ninth Street and Washington Avenue (2009) documents the demarcation line between the Monongahela River, Talbot Towers, and 805 Washington Avenue, the house where Grandma Ruby raised me. Society must accept some things as real; but [the artist] must always know that the visible reality hides a deeper one, and that all our action and all our achievement rests on things unseen. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Born Again of Water and Spirit, Ninth Street and Washington Avenue, from The Notion of Family, 2009. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier


I asked my mentor Kathe Kowalski, “If you’re no longer here, how will I know if I’m making strong work?” Her reply was the last thing she said to me: “You’ll know because your photographs will speak back to you and start to take you places.” For our knowledge is fragmentary (incomplete and imperfect), and our prophecy (our teaching) is fragmentary (incomplete and imperfect).

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Courtesy of: Cultured Magazine