Artists turn their lenses toward their own loved ones in “Family Pictures”

LaToya Ruby Frazier “Momme” 2008. Gelatin silver print.
Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York.

On Milwaukee
November 16, 2018
By Bobby Tanzilo

While I can’t provide any hard data, anyone who has visited art museums anywhere in the world can attest that people of color are typically under-represented in them.

Milwaukee Art Museum’s new “Family Pictures” photography exhibition, on view on the Herzfeld Center for Photography and Media Arts gallery through Jan. 20, is a step in the right direction.

Occupying the entire lower-level photography galleries, the show includes works by an intergenerational group of photographers, from the late Roy DeCarava and Gordon Parks to LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lyle Ashton Harris, Deana Lawson, and Carrie Mae Weems.

“Family Pictures” was organized by the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, but for its Milwaukee stop, some additional works have been included.

“Museums must broaden their collections and exhibitions to show diverse histories, viewpoints and narratives,” says Lisa Sutcliffe, MAM’s Herzfeld Curator of Photography and Media Arts.

“‘Family Pictures’ provides an opportunity to examine the ways in which family has been a vital force in shaping the African-American community from the Civil Rights era to the present moment.”

In a way, says Sutcliffe, the show – with its endearing portraits of grandparents with grandchildren, charmingly mundane everyday household scenes and other familial images – is both a complement and a counterpoint to “The San Quentin Project: Nigel Poor and the Men of San Quentin State Prison,” which is also currently on view at the museum.

“It builds on themes highlighted by ‘The San Quentin Project’,” Sutcliffe says, “which underscores the role of personal narratives and everyday stories to more fully represent a complex and nuanced understanding of human lives.”

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Courtesy of: On Milwaukee Online

Whitney Museum Independent Study Program 1968–2018

Whitney Museum of American Art
Symposium celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the Independent Study Program
Oct 19–20, 2018

LaToya Ruby Frazier with Anthony Cokes, Jonathan Crary, Laura Mulvey, and Ben Young for the “Media and Its Apparatuses” panel (Day 2, 12–2pm). Moderated by Soyoung Yoon.

The Independent Study Program (ISP) consists of three interrelated parts: Studio Program, Curatorial Program, and Critical Studies Program. The ISP provides a setting within which students pursuing art practice, curatorial work, art historical scholarship, and critical writing engage in ongoing discussions and debates that examine the historical, social, and intellectual conditions of artistic production. The program encourages the theoretical and critical study of the practices, institutions, and discourses that constitute the field of culture.

Courtesy of: Whitney Museum of American Art

Sundance Institute Names 2018 Art of Nonfiction Fellows and Grantees

Sundance Institute
October, 23, 2018
sundance.org

LaToya Ruby Frazier to receive support from the Sundance Institute’s Art Of Nonfiction Fellowship and Fund Program.

Congratulations to all the incredible recipients: Leilah Weinraub, Kevin Jerome Everson, Jem Cohen, Kevin B. Lee & Chloé Galibert-Laîné, Deborah Stratman, Natalia Almada, Sam Green, and Sky Hopinka.

 

From Unrestricted Grants to Custom-Tailored Support, Documentary Film Program Celebrates Innovative Approaches to Nonfiction Filmmaking

Los Angeles — Ten independent filmmakers working at the vanguard of inventive artistic practice in story, craft and form will receive distinctive opportunities from Sundance Institute’s Art of Nonfiction Fellowship and Fund.

“This year’s cohort reflects our continuing desire to explore the space in between,” said Tabitha Jackson, Director of the Documentary Film Program. “The space between art and film, between photography and moving image, between poetry and social justice, between artist and audience. And who better to lead us into this space of imaginative possibility, and beyond, than this particular group of creative adventurers.”

“Our intention with this program is to provide artist-based support to nonfiction filmmakers operating outside of formal convention, those contributing unique texture to the documentary landscape,” said John Cardellino, Producer of Art of Nonfiction. “As funders, we are thrilled to be in dialogue with these artists, to bring them into dialogue with each other, and to continue building a program rooted in the encouragement of uncompromisingly exploring one’s artistic ambitions.”

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Courtesy of: Sundance.org

Georgia’s Separate and Unequal
Special-Education System

 

Photograph by LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New YorkerThe New Yorker
October 1, 2018 issue
By Rachel Aviv

LaToya Ruby Frazier produced a new photographic series to visually represent and advocate justice for six-year-old Seth Murrell and his mother Latoya Martin exposing Georgia’s segregated school system and abuse of Black children with disabilities. Please read and learn about Georgia’s Separate and Unequal Special-Education System in the Oct.1st New Yorker issue.

A statewide network of schools for disabled students has trapped black children in neglect and isolation.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (idea) requires that students with disabilities learn in the “least restrictive environment,” a loose term that may mean different things depending on the race or the class of the student. Nirmala Erevelles, a professor of disability studies at the University of Alabama, told me that, “in general, when it comes to people of color—particularly poor people of color—we choose the most restrictive possibility,” sending students to “the most segregated and punitive spaces in the public-school system.” According to Beth Ferri, a disability scholar at Syracuse University, idea provided a kind of loophole to the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in schools. Now racial segregation continued “under the guise of ‘disability,’ ” she said. “You don’t need to talk about any race anymore. You can just say that the kid is a slow learner, or defiant, or disrespectful.” Ferri said that idea “treated disability as apolitical—a biological fact. It didn’t think about things like racial or cultural bias.”

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Courtesy of: The New Yorker

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s best photograph: me and my guardian angel


Grandma Ruby and Me. Photograph: LaToya Ruby Frazier

The Guardian
August 23, 2018
by Edward Siddons

My grandmother, who raised me, was a stern woman of very few words. She believed in strong discipline. But she was also a devoted caregiver. Growing up, she would dress me in Baby Jane ruffled dresses and braid my hair into two twists with ribbons and hair ballies. On the morning of this photo, which I took in 2005, she did my hair again, just like she did when I was a child.

Every Saturday afternoon, around the same time each week, she would tend to her porcelain dolls. She must have had hundreds, all in different sizes, different outfits, different nationalities. It was like the UN of porcelain dolls in her living room.

She began collecting them when my aunt – her daughter – was murdered. It was something to do with filling that loss. But it was also about pride. Despite growing up in a hard, industrial town like the one I grew up in, I never felt poor. The care she expended on them taught me that, no matter what the circumstances outside were like, we should always take care of ourselves. She taught me that we had value.

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Courtesy of: The Guardian

Access to Healthcare: A Conversation Led by LaToya Ruby Frazier

UPMC Life-Changing Medicine, 2012. From the series The Notion of Family

LaToya Ruby Frazier. UPMC Life-Changing Medicine, 2012. From the series The Notion of Family.

Art21 Magazine
July 6, 2018
LaToya Ruby Frazier

On January 27, 2018, a public discussion took place at Gavin Brown’s enterprise, in Harlem, on the occasion of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s solo exhibition (on view January 14–February 25), her largest show in New York to date. The exhibition featured three distinct bodies of work: Flint is Family, The Notion of Family, and A Pilgrimage to Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum. After Frazier and her mother each experienced complications with her health, the artist developed relationships within the medical community and began seeing the implications of her work within the medical profession: to serve as a document of unequal access to healthcare. At the gallery, Frazier led a panel discussion with a scholar, a minister, and a doctor on the state of access and equity in healthcare, the history of artists and intellectuals who have fought for these rights in the past, and change-makers who are leading the charge today.

Introductory statements

I believe that photographs are catalysts for change; they inspire hope and transformation. In the late 1940s, at the same time that the Lafargue Clinic was established, Gordon Parks and Ralph Ellison were collaborating on the body of work, Harlem is Nowhere. The purpose was to show what racism does to the psychology and the emotional stability of Black people in the United States, in Harlem in particular. Because these images were caught up in a bankruptcy lawsuit, they were never published in their full capacity.

What I find fascinating about this collaboration is what Ellison calls the “pictorial problem.” Ellison says in his notes to Parks, “To present photographic documentation of conditions that intensify mental disturbance, prints must be at once both document and symbol. …[The camera] must represent the negative sociological aspects of Harlem.” He continues, “… we shall try to begin with the maze of psychology, dispossession, and end with the maze, the clinic through which the individual is helped to rediscover himself, … in which he is given the courage to live in a hostile world. The point photographically is to disturb the reader through the same channel that he revives his visual information.” Ellison, who helped found the Lafargue Clinic, here creates a depiction of the psychology in Harlem.

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Courtesy of: Art21 Magazine