Brooklyn Magazine
by Ian Browning

The first-of-its-kind work by LaToya Ruby Frazier honors the players and their communities

The Liberty Portraits: A Monument to the 2024 Champions by LaToya Ruby Frazier at Barclays Center to celebrate the New York Liberty’s first-ever WNBA championship.

The parades for the New York Liberty’s historic WNBA championship may be over, but there is still celebration to be had. Today, BSE, the parent company of the Liberty and Nets, unveiled an art installation on Barclays Plaza by the acclaimed LaToya Ruby Frazier honoring the athletes that were a part of the team’s historic season.

Titled The Liberty Portraits: A Monument to the 2024 Champions, the installation features double-sided photographic portraits of the 2024 roster. One side shows the player in uniform, and on the other, we see the players with their chosen families in places meaningful to them.

Taking photos and interviewing relatives meant traveling across North America. From spending time with Jonquel Jones’ mother at her home in the Bahamas to visiting Marquesha Dra’shawn Davis’s family in Arkansas, Frazier covered a lot of ground. The artist interviewed the players’ families, creating testimonials displayed alongside the portraits. They reveal intimate details about the team, like the etymology of Betnijah Laney-Hamilton’s first name and the story of Sabrina Ionescu’s husband walking away from the NFL to support her through the season. In effect, the photos and testimonials create robust, larger-than-life celebrations of the players and their respective journeys towards winning the championship.

The Liberty Portraits: A Monument to the 2024 Champions by LaToya Ruby Frazier

“These six-foot portraits—on pedestals that make them nine feet tall—are arranged in this architectural installation that harkens [to] Mount Olympus,” Frazier said. “So when we think of Olympia and athletes, what I’m really doing is bringing the New York Liberty as these goddesses on their own mountain, at Barclays Plaza. They’re photographed in such a monumental way, where they command the dignity and respect of their humanity, and also their athletic excellence. They’re intended to stand as beacons of women’s leadership and sisterhood.”

Hailing from Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier’s photography has hung in solo shows at museums including MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, Seattle Art Museum, and ICA Boston. She is a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient, and her work exists at the nexus of cultural change, social justice, and the American experience.

The installation will be on display throughout the 2025 WNBA season, and is as much for the public as it is for the superfans. “While [fans] are waiting on the line, they will see these double-sided portraits, and because of the story and testimony,” she glowed, “they’ll feel an even deeper connection to the players.”

“It is so important and vital that we transcend race, class, gender, citizenship, sexuality, and you see this transcendence happening collectively and creatively through the way that we made the work,” Frazier added. “All of this is possible because of a collective with so many different people in different roles, believing that this is something worth having and celebrating and loving. And I’m just glad to be able to invest in the New York Liberty creatively and join in the choir of the millions of people who know women in sports is where it’s at.”

Jonquel Jones with family from The Liberty Portraits: A Monument to the 2024 Champions (2024 – 2025) ©LaToya Ruby Frazier. Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.

[…]

For now, Frazier is plenty excited about the installation. It’s hard not to notice the enthusiasm in her voice as she talks about basketball and her love for the Liberty. Basketball has been her first love since she was six years old, and she played until a high school injury ended her career. Her passion for the game is still present and evident.

“This came into existence because I believed that they were going to win last year,” Frazier noted. “I have been obsessively watching the Liberty since 1997. I believe, just like I told the Liberty when I met them, that I believed they were going to win. I told them that before they won, and I truly believe that this piece is going to be outside, in downtown Brooklyn, and they are gonna repeat. I’m just putting that creative energy out there, adding to the energy and the belief that they can do this again.”

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Courtesy of: Brooklyn Magazine

Los Angeles Times
By Christopher Knight

Trained as a sociologist, Lewis Hine picked up a camera and trained it on the cheap labor performed by children in American factories and on farms.

The exploitation shocked the public, Hine’s poetic photographs exposing the soul-crushing nature of childhoods lost to labor.

In the modern-day search for cheap labor, sometimes to replace migrant workers, many states want to roll back the child labor laws that Hine’s photographs helped to get passed.

Legislatures in 16 states, Florida prominent among them, have been deliberating rolling back child labor laws. In some cases, major steps have already been taken to loosen restrictions on work by kids as young as 14. The erasures, almost exclusively promoted by Republicans, target legal prohibitions against child exploitation that have been in place for nearly a century.

Here’s a surprise: Radical transformations in photography are one primary reason the threatened rollbacks have gotten traction.

In the first decade of the 20th century, sociologist Lewis W. Hine (1874-1940) picked up a camera and trained it on the cheap labor performed by children, which had become commonplace everywhere from Pittsburgh steel mills to Carolina textile factories, from an Alabama canning company for shucked oysters to West Virginia factories for glass. When published, Hine’s haunting pictures scandalized America, and laws to protect kids emerged.

[…]

LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Last Cruze (detail) 2019, mixed media. Photo: Elon Schoenholz

The transformation in photography today is not that artists have abandoned a productive interest in the state of the world, including these sorts of cruel labor conditions, which social documentary photographs explore. They haven’t. LaToya Ruby Frazier is one impressive example.

“The Last Cruze, her moving exhibition at Exposition Park’s California African American Museum in 2021, registered the lives of union workers at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio — workers displaced and disrupted when the factory was shuttered two years earlier. Frazier’s installation of 67 black-and-white photographs and one color video told an unflattering story of the human aftermath, and it did so in fascinating ways.

But it is also fair to say that her soulful installation did not — could not — generate the same sort of outrage that Hine’s photographs did. In 1908, when he began to publish his images of young children working under bleak conditions in factories and on farms, the context in which the pictures appeared was radically different from today’s visual environment.

Simply put, photographs were still scarce, relatively speaking, but they were on their way to replacing woodblock illustrations in newspapers and periodicals to become the dominant form of visual media. Camera pictures were disruptive. They connected straight to the world in front of the lens, and they had the capacity to grab eyeballs, pulling minds along with them.

Today, living in a media-saturated landscape, there’s no escape from them. Only rarely do they disrupt. Wake up in the morning, check your phone, and scores — maybe even hundreds — of pictures flash by before breakfast. In such a milieu, Hine’s troubling 1908 photographs would easily disappear, perhaps seizing a moment but soon evaporating into the visual miasma that floods the zone daily.

[…]

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Courtesy of: Los Angles Times