LaToya Ruby Frazier: More Than Conquerors Featuring LaToya Ruby Frazier and Jessica Holmes, with Madison McCartha Monday, April 10, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
Visual artist, photographer, and advocate LaToya Ruby Frazier joins Rail Art Editor Jessica Holmes for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Madison McCartha.
One day, artist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s body of work will be considered key to understanding how many Americans learned to look at their fellow citizens with a little more empathy and compassion in the first half of the 21st century.
Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, More Than Conquerors: A Monument For Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021–22. Photo by Sean Eaton courtesy of the artist and Carnegie Museum of Art.
Frazier’s photographs, gallery installations, books and essays resonate with an intensely personal vibe born and bred in Braddock, where she spent her formative years experiencing the effects of the steel industry’s collapse on her family and the community.
The images Frazier highlights in such award-winning works as “The Notion of Family” and “More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, MD,” — now on view at the Carnegie International through April 2 — invite viewers to wrestle with questions of social and environmental justice, cultural change and healthcare equity in their own communities and across the nation.
Just as Gordon Parks used his camera as a weapon against racism and poverty, Frazier came to the realization during her undergraduate years at Edinboro University that she would also make photographs that spoke to both the general public and the art world about the state of the country.
While Frazier is comfortable calling her work social commentary, it is never didactic, aesthetically lazy or an appendage of a political agenda. It is always soulful, meticulously composed, achingly alive and suffused with abundant levels of her own empathetic and compassionate gaze.
Frazier has always been inspired by art that she says addresses “the current, urgent political and economic shifts and trends in the nation that impact working class families and communities.”
“Being born and raised in Braddock, Pa., I understand that [challenge] deeply on a personal level as well as a political level,” Frazier says. “Because I grew up in the ’80s, that was me being a little girl looking at the impact of the Reagan administration’s policies on communities like Braddock.
“But then, being a young Black woman at the nexus of all of this social justice and cultural change is something that we hadn’t seen in the 21st century,” she says. “So I’ve really embraced how I’ve been born and raised. That all informs and impacts the depths with which my work takes different approaches and modes whether through photographs, writing, interviews, performance, immersive photographic installations or [workers] monuments.”
Frazier believes viewers can sense “the whole breadth of the 20 years of practice” that went into each piece.
While exceptionally well-composed and beautiful, they are not intended to make viewers feel good. They are not intended to hang over couches or reinforce the smugness of the ruling classes. The work is a tangible witness to the systemic deindustrialization that has hollowed out the American dream.
“These are [about] steel mill towns, coal mining regions, automotive industries,” she says. “What you actually see me doing is taking these micro-level experiences and scaling them up into macro-level conversations about the stories we tell around America’s great industrial past — its technical evolution.”
She also notes that her work, especially the monuments “create a safe space and opportunity for working Americans to talk about their lives and their labor and why they care about the work they do without being threatened by their employer.”
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May 12, 2024 – September 7, 2024 The Museum of Modern Art 11 West 53rd Street New York, NY 10019
The Museum of Modern Art announces LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, the first museum survey dedicated to the artist-activist, on view at MoMA from May 12 through September 7, 2024. For more than two decades, Frazier has used photography, text, moving images, and performance to revive and preserve forgotten narratives of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial era. Bringing together work from 2001 to 2024, this exhibition highlights the full range of Frazier’s practice to date and includes several rarely- and never-before-seen works.
“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 amnesia,”
Artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier
Born in 1982 in the steel manufacturing town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier has used photography, text, moving images, and performance to revive and preserve forgotten stories of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial era. LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity surveys the full range of the artist’s practice, highlighting her role as a social advocate and connector of the cultural and working classes in the 21st century.
For this exhibition, Frazier has reimagined her diverse bodies of work as a sequence of original installations that she calls “monuments for workers’ thoughts,” which address the harmful effects of industrialization and deindustrialization, the healthcare inequities facing Black working-class communities in the Rust Belt, the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the impact of the closure of a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Monuments for Solidarity celebrates the expressions of creativity, mutual support, and intergenerational collaboration that persist in light of these denials of fundamental labor, human, and civil rights. As a form of Black feminist world-building, these nontraditional “monuments” demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played and continue to play in histories of labor and the working class.
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity is organized by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator, with Antoinette D. Roberts and Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistants, Department of Photography.
LaToya Ruby Frazier Scholar’s Day. November 18, 2022. Organized by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator of Photography, and Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, at The Museum of Modern Art.
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More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022
March 2, 2023 – April 15, 2023 Opening reception: March 2, 5pm – 7pm Gladstone Gallery 530 West 21st Street New York, NY Press Release
Gladstone is pleased to announce its first exhibition with LaToya Ruby Frazier. The show presents the artist’s most recent work, More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022, for the first time in New York after its recent premiere at the 58th Carnegie International, in which it won the highest award. Comprising stainless steel IV poles, archival inkjet prints, and text panels, this installation was created as a celebration of the community health workers (CHWs) of Baltimore, Maryland, and proposes a new approach to monument making in the 21st century.
Installation view, LaToya Ruby Frazier, More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022, 2021 – 2022, Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2023. Commissioned by Carnegie Museum of Art for the 58th Carnegie International.
The origin of this work was first borne from a conversation in 2015 hosted by The Contemporary and The Baltimore School for the Arts between the artist and Dr. Lisa Cooper, Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health and the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, on the ways in which art, science, medicine, technology, and politics might intersect to benefit society and address health inequity and environmental racism. During this discussion, Dr. Cooper explained the medical significance of one of Frazier’s most seminal bodies of work, The Notion of Family (2001-14), and how this photographic documentary series was a form of medical visual art that closely related it to a concept known as photovoice, in which oppressed individuals use cameras and storytelling to document disparities in their environments that are shared with doctors and policymakers in order to bring forth awareness and change. Their friendship grew more personal when Dr. Cooper interceded on behalf of Frazier’s mother with the healthcare system. Conversations continued and the two began to think through how to collaborate on a project around social justice and health equity.
As the COVID-19 Pandemic and quarantine ensued Frazier received a 2020–21 National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship and a commission for the Carnegie Museum 58th Carnegie International. After experiencing yet another incident of medical injustice while trying to obtain a first dose of the COVID vaccine, Frazier was connected through Dr. Cooper with mentees Chidinma Ibe, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Anika Hines assistant professor and health equity researcher at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Reverend Debra Hickman, president and CEO of STAR (Sisters Together and Reaching Inc.) an organization with CHWs involved in the initial vaccination rollout. Dr. Ibe introduced Frazier to Tiffany Scott, the first certified CHW in the state of Maryland and the co-founder and chair of the Maryland Community Health Worker Association. Together they introduced Frazier to CHWs, individuals who play an essential role in providing life-saving support to those overlooked or blocked from receiving adequate medical assistance. Since the 1970s, CHWs have been invaluable connectors between residents, healthcare systems, and state health departments, increasing awareness of public health access and threats to ensure the safety of underserved communities.
Overlooked themselves, Frazier conceived of a worker’s monument to honor CHWs on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic and to honor the leadership, research, and relationships of Dr. Cooper, Dr. Ibe, Dr. Hines, Rev. Hickman and Tiffany Scott who are at the forefront of advocating and impacting policy change in support of community health workers. Between July 2021 – September 2022 Frazier made portraits and conducted interviews with CHWs while performing outreach and vaccination rollouts serving their communities. Additionally, Frazier taught CHWs how to make their own photographs in workshops led by Dr. Ibe for a photovoice component of the study “Amplifying the Lived Experiences of Community Health Workers” (ALEC) at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. With her incisive documentary approach to artmaking Frazier then transcribed, edited, printed, mounted, framed, designed and fabricated this immersive monument for workers’ thoughts on behalf of, for, with, and about the role and importance of CHWs in society and their relationships with doctors and faith leaders in their community who strongly advocate for their work and livelihoods. This monument proclaims that community health workers should be seen as a profession, as salaried employees with full healthcare benefits and leave. The monument is comprised of eighteen medical IV poles that are nine feet tall and social-distance-spaced. The audience is welcome to walk among them to embody the social distance we’ve come to know so well, to contemplate and reflect on each testimony and portrait face-to-face, and to have a moment of silence in order to mourn the loss of loved ones to COVID-19.
Through the close relationships the artist formed with the CHWs, doctors, and faith leader that were part of this significant undertaking, More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022 uproots the notion of what a monument can look like, who it serves, and what it celebrates in order to bring us closer to a more equitable and just society.
A visit to the Noguchi Museum in Queens to explore the legacy of world-renowned sculptor, Isamu Noguchi. Then a profile of photographer and video artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose work follows in the social documentary tradition of Walker Evans and Gordon Parks.
Visual art is a doorway to new insights and revelations. It can challenge the expected narrative and transform our way of perceiving and understanding, if even for a moment. Join Trinity as we welcome artists who invite us to see our relationships, culture, and environment in a new way—calling us to respond and take part in creating a more just future.
LaToya Ruby Frazier Art as Transformation: Using Photography for Social Change February 12, 2023 from 1–3pm Trinity Commons
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work depicts the stark reality of today’s America: post-industrial cities riven by poverty, racism, healthcare inequality, and environmental toxicity. By featuring voices and perspectives traditionally erased from the American narrative, MacArthur “Genius” Frazier not only captures our cultural blind spots—she teaches us how art is a powerful tool for making change. Frazier will join in conversation with the Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas to discuss the transformative power of art.
Photo credit: Robbie Fimmano
LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her artistic practice spans a range of media, including photography, video, performance, installation art, and books, and centers on the nexus of social justice, cultural change, and commentary on the American experience. In various interconnected bodies of work, Frazier uses collaborative storytelling with the people who appear in her artwork to address topics of industrialism, Rust Belt revitalization, environmental justice, access to healthcare, access to clean water, Workers’ Rights, Human Rights, family, and communal history. This builds on her commitment to the legacy of 1930s social documentary work and 1960s and ’70s conceptual photography that addresses urgent social and political issues of everyday life.
Frazier is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she currently lives and works. She is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York City and Brussels Belgium, and Sant’Andrea de Scaphis in Rome.
This event is free, with childcare available upon request. Registrants may also attend via live stream. Register Here
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