LaToya Ruby Frazier Puts a Face on the US Labour Crisis

Frieze Magazine
by Ian Bourland

The artist’s moving portraits of ‘unallocated’ auto workers in Lordstown, Ohio, on view at the Renaissance Society, celebrate the power of unions as job losses hit US manufacturing

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

During the late summer of 2019, some thirty General Motors plants were idled across the US during the strike of 49,000 members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union – the largest such stoppage in half a century. At stake were matters of equity for new workers, better wages and the security of health coverage. The American auto industry and its supply chains are crucial to the economies of the ‘rust belt’ states of the Midwest, and at the centre of debates around free trade, offshoring, and the future of labour in the country. In a bargain that ended the strike, UAW assented to the shuttering of three plants, including the hulking Lordstown Assembly in eastern Ohio. The latter has been in operation since the middle of last century and, until March 2019, produced the compact Chevrolet Cruze.

The photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier was on hand as the last Cruze was assembled and later transported to a dealership in nearby Boardman, Ohio. In 2018, the year the 3,000 members of the local UAW chapters 1112 and 1714 merged, Frazier began a larger project of collaboration and advocacy for the workers. She has dedicated her current exhibition of 67 photographs and one video work at the Renaissance Society and a portfolio for The New York Times to raising awareness about the imminent decimation of a community and telling the stories of a place that once exemplified the ‘American Dream’.

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Courtesy of: Frieze Magazine

Artist’s Lordstown photos are a call to action —

‘The workers are the heroes’

Detroit Free Press
by Jamie L. LaReau

Photographer and artist LaToya Ruby Frazier prepares to fly over GM’s Lordstown Assembly Plant to photograph it for a photo essay on GM closing the plant. (Photo: LaToya Ruby Frazier)

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s initial encounter with General Motors involved water, not cars.

About five years ago, GM was first to complain that corrosion, caused by high levels of chloride in the Flint water, was rusting engine blocks at its Flint Engine Operations.

“They were immediately shifted off the Flint River to the Flint township water, which was not contaminated,” said Frazier, an artist and professor of photography associated with the Art Institute of Chicago who was a 2015 MacArthur fellow. “It made me realize that corporations have access to more basic human rights than people do.”

Frazier spent four years in Flint photographing the impact of the bad water on its residents’ health.

GM would get her attention again on Nov. 26, 2018. That day, GM said it would cease operations at five of its plants in North America.

“My heart dropped. I immediately became very concerned for those workers and their families,” Frazier said. “I felt it was my duty and obligation to be there for the workers.”

Frazier did just that, spending nine months in Lordstown, Ohio, photo-documenting GM’s closure of its Lordstown Assembly plant — which GM sold Thursday to an electric truck start-up.

GM did not cooperate with her, but she still managed to capture 67 evocative photos of UAW members that reveal how their lives were forever altered when the last Chevrolet Cruze car rolled off the line in March and GM shut the doors to the plant.

The photos are part of an exhibit called “The Last Cruze” at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago. It runs through Dec. 1. Next, it goes to the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University.

Frazier’s ultimate goal is to bring the exhibit to the Motor City, in part because of the rich history of union activism and civil rights here.

“Artists function best at keeping history alive,” said Frazier. “This (Lordstown) exhibit is a monument, a testament and a memorial to Lordstown, to UAW Local 1112 and to the United Auto Workers’ legacy.”

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Courtesy of: Detroit Free Press

Bryan Stevenson’s Moral Clarity

The Wall Street Journal Magazine
by Donovan X. Ramsey

The human rights lawyer, whose memoir is the basis for the forthcoming film ‘Just Mercy,’ has devoted his life to fighting for the convicted and the condemned.

LaToya photographed Bryan Stevenson for the Wall Street Journal’s 2019 Innovators issue. Bryan and LaToya were both recipients of the Gordon Parks Award in 2016.

In mid-September, human rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson took the stage at the 30th-anniversary gala for the Equal Justice Initiative, the Montgomery, Alabama–based nonprofit he founded to provide legal representation to individuals who have been wrongfully convicted, unfairly sentenced or subject to prison abuse. The attendees assembled in a hotel ballroom in Midtown Manhattan were a mix of philanthropists, scholars and attorneys. The poet Elizabeth Alexander, who read at President Obama’s first inauguration, was there, as was musician Jon Batiste. Most knew what EJI does and who Stevenson is. They’d likely heard him…

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Courtesy of: The Wall Street Journal Magazine

Anti-Capitalist Chronicles: GM Plant Closing

Professor David Harvey talks about the work of photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier who documents the news of the Lordstown, Ohio plant closing and the impact it had on the workers, families and community at large.

Courtesy of: Democracy at Work

In San Francisco, Wielding Influence (Gently) Through Art

The New York Times
by Ted Loos

“Soft Power” looks at how creativity helps to shape society.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Shea and Zion drinking a sip of water from their freshwater spring, Jasper County, Newton, Mississippi from the series Flint is Family II, 2017; courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York and Rome

“Soft Power,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through mid-February, epitomizes its era in that it looks self-consciously at the ways in which cultural influence is exerted, with special attention to previously hidden voices.

“The title is a twist on the Reagan-era phrase,” said Eungie Joo, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, who conceived the show.

In the late 1980s, the phrase, coined by Joseph S. Nye Jr., the political scientist, was employed in a foreign policy context. It referred to the ability of the United States to influence countries’ behavior without coercion or force, through cultural institutions, universities, churches, media or other civic means.

For Ms. Joo, it helped her organize her thoughts about “a generation of artists who are concerned with their role in society as citizens and social actors.”

The exhibition features 20 artists, some of whom have done special commissions for it, and it has an international flavor — perhaps ironically, given the title’s original all-American slant. Many of the participants were born outside of the United States or work in other countries.

The roster includes some contributors like the American photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, who have had substantial museum exposure, and others like the Turkish artist Cevdet Erek who may be new to viewers.

The title and concept were especially appealing to the artist Tavares Strachan, who grew up in Nassau in the Bahamas and now lives and works mostly in New York.

“‘Soft power’ is a contradiction in terms,” Mr. Strachan said over the summer, on a brief break from creating new work in his large Chelsea studio. “But yin and yang is a fundamental part of making anything compelling.”

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Courtesy of: The New York Times

Episode No. 412: LaToya Ruby Frazier

The Modern Art Notes Podcast features LaToya Ruby Frazier.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast features LaToya Ruby Frazier
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The Renaissance Society in Chicago is showing “LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze.” The exhibition features a new body of work that focuses on the United Auto Workers members at General Motors’s Lordstown, Ohio plant. The facility, which had produced automobiles for over 50 years, was recently “unallocated” by GM — a term-of-art that indicates the plant has been shut down. Until recently it produced the Chevrolet Cruze. Frazier’s pictures present members of UAW Local 1112, and tell the story of their lives and the community they’ve built in northeastern Ohio. On September 14, the day the exhibition opened in Chicago, the UAW’s current national contract with the Big Three automakers — GM, Ford and Chrysler — ended. The UAW instigate a strike at GM plants. It is already the longest strike against GM since 1970. “The Last Cruze” is on view through December 1. It was curated by Karsten Lund and Solveig Øvstebø.

LaToya Ruby Frazier is a Chicago-based artist whose work most often examines the ways in which corporations have impacted the lives of workers, their families and their communities. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at numerous museums in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and across the United States. She was the recipient of a 2015 MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant, and has also received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and USA Artists.

Air date: September 26, 2019.

Courtesy of: The Modern Art Notes Podcast