The Gordon Parks Foundation in Pleasantville, New York, and the German publisher Steidl, which is based in Göttingen, have announced the launch of a new prize for artists whose practices reflect and extend Gordon Parks’s legacy of using photography as a tool to advance social justice. LaToya Ruby Frazier has been named the prize’s inaugural recipient. She will be given the opportunity to publish a book with Steidl in 2021.
“Gordon Parks’s vision and actions as a photographer, composer, filmmaker, and writer have taught me to fight for humanity, empathy, justice, and integrity in all of my photographs,” Frazier said in statement. “His everlasting endurance to unveil the power of visual storytelling on his own terms, in the face of bigotry, violence, and institutional inequality, teach me to create works of art that lift the voice and visibility of the people in ways that triumph over systemic and structural abuse in America.”
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LaToya Ruby Frazier poses with the final Chevrolet Cruze produced at the General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Photo by Fred Squillante, The Columbus Dispatch.
Visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier spent nine months documenting the workers at the Chevrolet Cruze assembly line in Lordstown both before and after they rolled the final car off the assembly line. More than 60 of those images will be the subject of an exhibition opening Saturday at the Wexner Center for the Arts.
The news being reported on her television upset photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier.
The visual artist’s career was one dedicated to being a voice for working-class people across the Rust Belt, so the November 2018 reports that General Motors would close five North American plants in the coming year wasn’t something she took lightly.
The number of jobs affected was astonishing — 14,700 — but all Frazier could think about were the lives behind that figure. About 1,600 of them were at the Chevrolet Cruze assembly line in Lordstown, a small Ohio village located about 15 miles northwest of Youngstown.
“I was deeply concerned for the community, those workers, their families,” said Frazier, 38, a Chicago resident. “There is no way I’m going to idly sit back.”
After spending a month traveling to automobile trade shows around the Midwest to gather research about the Cruze, Frazier arrived in Lordstown on Feb. 9. The resulting 18-page photo spread in The New York Times Magazine wasn’t the end of her connection to the plant; Frazier kept returning to the community for months to photograph the workers both before and after they rolled the final Cruze off the assembly line.
More than 60 of those images will be the subject of an exhibition opening Saturday at the Wexner Center for the Arts. “LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze” is a stark examination of the uncertainty that many workers faced when the plant closed — or was “unallocated,” in the parlance of GM officials — last March.
The #waterislife mural on the side of Gavin Brown’s Enterprise inn New York
FLINT, Michigan — Countless numbers of Flint residents have driven by the #waterislife and #nofilter water bottle display, stuck in the worn fences between West Pierson Road and Sussex Drive. It was a message, a symbol of hope, and a battle cry for Flint residents caught in the war with state and local governments about the Flint Water Crisis. We know on April 25, 2014 Flint switched the water supply from Detroit to Flint after 50 years. We know pediatric studies showed elevated lead levels in Flint children.
But what we don’t know is the story of two courageous women, who in the midst of a man-made water crisis, were responsible for those two displays of resilience as part of their local artist collective called the Sister Tour.
Created in 2017, the Sister Tour harnesses the life stories of Amber Hasan and Shea Cobb, as they, like many Flint residents, have lived life with lead in their water since 2014. The tour was their response to a crisis that ravaged their city, shifting the scene from a growing conscious creative collective to a war-torn community. The tour seeks to re-establish sisterhood by giving Flint women of color a platform for their creative expression and freedom, even if that means babysitting for a couple of hours or offering a listening ear.
“I’m gonna to hit up my sister, if I needed some advice,” explains Hasan. “If I need somebody to watch my kids, I’m gonna hit up my sister. Within this, is being able to help women, artists, and entrepreneurs with just those things.”
Hasan and Cobb are mothers themselves while also balancing the dynamic of being creatives of every sort. Hasan, 38, is an entrepreneur and creative mastermind behind The Loud Mouth Ghetto Girl, a stage name she created in 2016 to perform her conscious raps and One Woman Show around the city. Cobb, 35, under the stage name Phire Sis, is a songstress, poet, and author of her poetry book “Travels In My Car.” The duo met in the early ’90s when they were growing up in the same neighborhood and became like sisters. They both graduated from Southwestern Classical Academy in different years, Hasan in 1999 and Cobb in 2003.
“Amber and myself had been putting on shows, being a part of that community and involving people around us and culture and art,” Cobb said. “We had found a way to make money move amongst us as women. We [are able to] give women this phenomenal platform.”
Together Hasan and Cobb caught the attention of photojournalist and MacArthur Genius Grant winner LaToya Ruby Frazier who spent a five-month stint in 2015 documenting the effects of the Flint Water Crisis for her Elle magazine photo essay. Cobb and Hasan were her main connection, welcoming Frazier into the intimate moments of their families, their jobs, and their art. But there were several moving parts. Hasan was planning to go to Puerto Rico to visit family and Cobb was working as a Flint community school bus driver with plans to move to Mississippi where her family was from. Through it all, their bond with Frazier grew.
“She became a [sister] to us,” said Hasan in reflection. “She asked us what do we need as artists? What would make it easier for us to do our work? So she gifted us.”
Frazier’s work was published in August 2016. Hasan and Cobb saw the acclaim received from the photo essay and it solidified their artistic mission. Frazier gave them a platform and they wanted to do the same for other women.
From Albrecht Dürer to LaToya Ruby Frazier, artists have for centuries depicted and reflected on health and illness.
PRINCETON, New Jersey — Lately, I’ve been starting my days with the daily e-mails of a neighbor, his meditations on coping with cancer and addiction, as well as the YouTube videos of a friend accepting the end of her life without intervention. “Cancer is nature’s way of taking care of my body,” writes my friend, who founded a program that treats addiction and other issues with a plant-based diet.
As we assume a greater role in the management and acceptance of our illnesses and dying, the emerging field of medical humanities is informing conversations around health crises. The Princeton University Art Museum has jumped into the fray with States of Health: Visualizing Illness and Healing.
An engaging selection of works by Leonora Carrington, Edvard Munch, Jackson Pollock, Gordon Parks, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Albrecht Dürer, and others come together to illuminate illness and healing in art. Experts in infectious diseases, disability, literature, medicine, contagion, psychology, and creative writing weigh in, in the form of short essays on the walls, responding to the 80 objects from antiquity to present day.
The exhibition explores the different ways ailments — such as the bubonic plague, mental illness, and the AIDS crisis — have been addressed. Molecular biology professor Bonnie L. Bassler, in her essay, points out that the “causes of disease do their work at the atomic and microscopic scales,” and we use words like witchcraft, the plague, consumption, dropsy to describe their power. […]
Among the more poignant works in a show filled with heart breakers is MacArthur Fellow LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Landscape of the Body (Epilepsy Test)” (2011). Frazier has documented hope and despair among working class families in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving steel town. This diptych of gelatin silver prints is not easy to look at — the flesh on the back of a figure, hooked up to monitors, is visible through her parted hospital gown, and in the image on the right are the ruins of a building. The woman in the printed hospital gown is Frazier’s mother, receiving treatment for epilepsy, and the ruined building is the UPMC Braddock Hospital, demolished in 2011. This facility, vital to the predominantly African American community, many of whom suffered from environmental toxins related to the steel mill, was replaced by one in an affluent Pittsburgh suburb. While documenting this inequity, Frazier said she felt the ground tremble like a convulsion similar to the seizures her mother suffered.
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National art critic Ben Davis, reveals his top 100 picks of key artworks of the 2010s.
“Best of” lists are always at least half frauds. After all, no one can really see all the movies or read all the books in a year, let alone a decade—but at least film critics or literature critics are debating things that offer the same experience no matter where you are. The nature of art means that the exercise is extra arbitrary. A really successful work of art might travel to different museums, but it also might not. So you are left either taking someone else’s word for what was good or leaving out important touchstones.
If you were to map out the geography of the works I mention below, it would look like a target, with most of the darts falling right around where I live, New York. The distribution of hits would then scatter out from the bullseye, landing at more and more random points the farther they get. You really feel your own limitations when you try to put together a list like this.
Nevertheless, I think there’s some interest in picking out not just artists or general trends, but specific artworks. I find it’s hard to do that, which is exactly why it’s worth doing—to take note of specific images or ideas that appeared this decade and that particularly stuck, even if not everyone is going to agree on how exactly to value them.
Still, I’m left facing my own limitations. Just picking personal favorites leaves out a lot that was objectively influential, but pretending it’s some kind of objective “Greatest Hits” leaves you just measuring raw popularity (in which case, Wall Street’s Fearless Girl would be #1).
So I thought of five measures by which I might estimate artworks’ importance: by originality/invention (the degree to which they introduced something new to the conversation); form/style (how memorable they were as a specific image or idea); depth/nuance (whether coming back to them was rewarding, or revealed new layers); symbolic power (the degree to which they seemed to stand as symbol of some bigger conversation, moment, or emergent cultural sensibility); and popularity/influence (how big a deal they were, either to other artists or to the wider public).
Combing back through a decade’s worth of seeing, reading about, and writing about art, and squinting at it through the lenses of these five categories, I came up with a list of artworks that balance between these values, converging toward works that fire on most cylinders at the top. (I didn’t want to repeat artists, because that made the list more boring.) […]
LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Notion of Family (2014)
The story Frazier tells in the photos of The Notion of Family relates to the bleakness and abandonment of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the majority African American town where she grew up. The series is notable for the way that it combines the directness of black-and-white social documentary with a wrenchingly personal approach, returning again and again to the artist herself, her mother, and her grandmother. There’s just an overwhelming heaviness to The Notion of Family, everyone pinned still as if trapped.
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The New York Times by Dean Baquet, Executive Editor
Lordstown, Ohio, March 30. Kesha Scales, a metal assembly worker, with Beverly Williams, her friend and former co-worker, after General Motors shut down its Lordstown plant, cutting thousands of jobs. LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New York Times
5.6 million. That’s roughly the number of images photo editors of The New York Times sift through each year to find the perfect photographs to represent the news for our readers. This collection of images is a testament to a mere fraction of the conflicts and triumphs, catastrophes and achievements and simple but poignant moments of everyday life in the past 365 days.
So much of the year’s news played out in the streets. Week after week, protesters poured onto the wide boulevards of Hong Kong, where the photographer Lam Yik Fei seemed to be everywhere. Brexit drew tens of thousands into the streets of London. A subway fare increase was the final spark that led to protests in Santiago, Chile, and people heaved makeshift bombs along a bridge linking Venezuela and Colombia.
The tumult of mass gatherings produced some of the year’s most powerful pictures. But a quiet image of two people stood out as perhaps the saddest: Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez lay with his arm limply draped over his 23-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria, their lifeless bodies locked together on the banks of the Rio Grande, where they drowned trying to cross from Mexico into the United States.
Every year the photo editors of The New York Times cull through 365 days of photographs in an attempt to recapture and visually distill the year. The result is this collection of images, a visual chronicle of violence, political power struggles, climate catastrophes, mass shootings and a few poignant scenes of everyday life.
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