PhotoNOLA covers 70 exhibitions

Gambit Weekly
by Jake Clapp

Shea and Zion at the Badawest Restaurant on Corruna Rd., 2016 / 2017

PhotoNOLA covers 70 exhibitions in its 2019 festival Dec. 11-14

Seventy exhibitions, along with workshops and other special events, fall under PhotoNOLA’s broad umbrella this year. Now in its 14th year, PhotoNOLA 2019, produced by the New Orleans Photo Alliance, takes place Wednesday, Dec. 11, through Saturday, Dec. 14, at local galleries, museums and alternative spaces.

It’s a wide celebration of art and documentary photography, mixing shows of artists on a national platform — Mickalene Thomas (her “Femmes Noires” is on display at the Contemporary Arts Center); William Christenberry (“Memory is a Strange Bell” at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art); and LaToya Ruby Frazier (“Flint is Family” at Newcomb Art Museum) — with the work of those based in south Louisiana.

Some exhibitions have an international focus, such as “Crisis of Now: Contemporary Asian Photography Part II,” featuring work by three Taiwanese photographers, at UNO’s St. Claude Gallery; and “Mama Temos/Elephant Mothers,” Meryt Harding’s solo show of images from Kenya, at Sullivan Gallery.

And there’s the intensely personal to New Orleans: Steven Forster’s “40 Years Finale/Encore,” a perspective of the photographer’s work from the mid 1970s to today, at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Gallery; Thomas Cole’s “Love at First Sight: The Soul of a City” at the Jazz & Heritage Center Helis Gallery; and Donald Maginnis’ photos of New Orleans’ Vietnamese community, on display at Pho Noi Viet Restaurant on Magazine Street.

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Courtesy of: Gambit Weekly

LaToya Ruby Frazier and Julia Reichert in Conversation

February 18, 2020
Presented by Wexner Center for the Arts

This year’s Lambert Family Lecture brings together visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier and filmmaker Julia Reichert to discuss the power of art to spur social and political change. Frazier’s exhibition The Last Cruze is currently on view at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and Reichert’s American Factory (2019) is part of the touring, Wex-organized retrospective Julia Reichert: 50 Years in Film. Onstage the pair will delve into topics stemming from their recent projects, including the state of labor at home and abroad, the evolution of collective action, and more.

Don’t miss free related screenings programmed in conjunction with this year’s lecture. The galleries will remain open until 7 pm on February 18 for you to enjoy.

Established in 2004 through the generosity of Bill and Sheila Lambert, the Lambert Family Lecture Series invites experts to explore global issues in art and contemporary culture with the region’s diverse audiences, often to illuminate the works on view in our galleries. To date the series has featured art historians, critics, and curators T. J. Clark, Douglas Crimp, Arthur Danto, Greil Marcus, Lynne Tillman, Diana Widmaier Picasso, and Robert Storr; filmmaker, author, and provocateur John Waters; and visual artists Carroll Dunham, Christian Marclay, Josiah McElheny, and Luc Tuymans.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020 • 7–9pm
Free for all audiences (RSVP requested)
Register Here

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Courtesy of: Columbus Makes Art

“The Notion of Family” is one of The Best Art Books of the Decade

ARTnews
by Alex Greenberger

Art books are forever, but the past decade brought forth what very well might have been more than ever before. ARTnews released a survey of the best art books published from 2010 to 2019, ranked in order of importance. They run the gamut from fiction to photo-books, and some have altered art history along the way.

Courtesy of Aperture.org

“The Notion of Family” by LaToya Ruby Frazier (Aperture, 2014)

LaToya Ruby Frazier is among the best photographers working today, and her first photo-book offered an intense preview of what has happened since. Centuries-long histories of racism and economic oppression are made personal through Frazier’s stark black-and-white images of her family, and her approach has informed the way a host of young Black photographers are taking pictures now.

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Courtesy of: ARTnews

Do Artists Have ‘Soft Power’ To Create Political Change?

Frieze Magazine
by Adam Kleinman

An exhibition at SFMOMA, named for the 1990 geopolitical term, considers the relationship between art and activism since the fall of the Iron Curtain

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mr. Smiley standing with his daughter Shea and his granddaughter Zion on their fresh water spring, Jasper County, Newton, Mississippi, from the series ‘Flint is Family II’, 2017
© LaToya Ruby Frazier. Courtesy: the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

SFMOMA

At the close of the Cold War, the US political scientist Joseph Nye coined the term ‘soft power’, a theory which holds that nations can wield their cultural influence to gain allies more efficiently than by economic or military coercion alone. After nearly 30 years of US co-option, though, the country now finds itself losing most of its friends. ‘SOFT POWER’, curated by Eungie Joo, fittingly turns Nye’s theory on its head, examining how 20 artists ‘deploy art to explore their roles as citizens and social actors.’ Rather than seeking to export values, many of the works on display shine a harsh light on the US’s own socio-political ills.

60 monochromatic panels that comprise Xaviera Simmons’s potent mural-sized assemblage, They’re All Afraid, All Of Them, That’s It! They’re All Southern! The Whole United States Is Southern! (2019), punctuated by more panels with statements on the legacy of chattel slavery, borrow their chequered palette from Jacob Lawrence’s landmark Migration Series (1941), a collection of paintings documenting the transit of black souls to the industrial North during Jim Crow. In a deft curatorial move, the same gallery also includes LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint Is Family, Part II (2019), a series of photographs documenting a contemporary African American family that has moved to the South from Flint, Michigan in the wake of that city’s on-going water crisis. Although the spectre of Flint hangs over the images, Frazier’s empowering focus on one family’s life on a Mississippi ranch with fresh spring water counters the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ style of journalism that sells content through sensationalistic images of violence, particularly against people of colour.

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Courtesy of: Frieze Magazine

LaToya Ruby Frazier Looks Beyond Blue-Collar Stereotypes

Hyperallergic
by Laura Raicovich

In The Last Cruze, the artist hones in on the vast inequities that persist in US society, as well as the tender relationships that enable survival and persistence in spite of them.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, The Last Cruze (installation view) at the Renaissance Society, 2019
Photo: Useful Art Services

CHICAGO

In her exhibition, The Last Cruze LaToya Ruby Frazier presents a deep dive into lives of factory workers in Lordstown, Ohio, still reeling from General Motor’s decision to “unallocate” (read: effectively close) the local plant whose production of the eponymous sedan had guaranteed their livelihoods. At the Renaissance Society, Frazier installed over 60 photographs from this new body of work, alongside texts and other elements that portray the resulting state of limbo, as workers must decide to accept relocation, or lose their jobs, pensions, and benefits.

Frazier’s work has always offered an unflinching sense of intimacy and directness; it parses the violent aftermath of late-stage capitalism and racism, even as it highlights the resiliency of affected communities. In The Last Cruze, she unsentimentally preserves the stories of union reps, assembly-line workers, managers, workers in adjacent industries, and those of their families and children.

Installed on a series of orange-red panels that hang from the ceiling, the exhibition is immediately reminiscent of the assembly line. Panels of texts and images are hung close together, leaving little space to navigate between each, positioning the viewer in close proximity to the people Frazier has so sensitively photographed, and only inches from the details they relayed to her about their lives in the wake of an economic and social undoing. The gallery’s chapel-like space is further accentuated by the different hues of blue chosen for the walls and ceiling panels, as well as by several large scale prints installed high above the red assembly-line.

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Courtesy of: HYPERALLERGIC

TED Talk at “We The Future “

A creative solution for the water crisis in Flint, Michigan

Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier spent five months living in Flint, Michigan, documenting the lives of those affected by the city’s water crisis for her photo essay “Flint is Family.” As the crisis dragged on, she realized it was going to take more than a series of photos to bring relief. In this inspiring, surprising talk, she shares the creative lengths she went to in order to bring free, clean water to the people of Flint.

This TED talk was presented at “We the Future,” a special event in partnership with the Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation.

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Courtesy of: TED.com

Photo: Ryan Lash / TED