“LaToya Ruby Frazier: Artist as Advocate” Whitewall Magazine interview

Portrait by Steve Benisty

Portrait by Steve Benisty

Whitewall Magazine
April 27, 2018
by Katy Donoghue

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Artist as Advocate

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an advocate. Through her work—in photography, video, and the written word—she’s made visible the untold stories of her hometown devastated by the loss of the steel industry; a family in Flint, Michigan, affected by the water crisis; former miners of Le Grand-Hornu in Belgium; and her own family.

She realized the potential of her artmaking when she saw Gordon Parks’s photograph American Gothic for the first time. Realizing that she could craft social commentary in her practice was a revelation. That pursuit earned her a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2015; exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, and the ICA in Boston; and several shows in Europe.

Early this year, she opened her first show in New York since 2013. Taking over three floors of Gavin Brown’s enterprise in Harlem were three bodies of work: “The Notion of Family” (2001–2014), “A Pilgrimage to Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum” (2016–2017), and “Flint Is Family” (2016–2017).

Whitewall spoke with Frazier about the power and beauty in honoring other people’s humanity.

Read entire interview…

Courtesy of: Whitewall

Flint, 1,462 Days and Counting Man-Made Water Crisis, 2018

Flint, 1,462 days and Counting Man-Made Water Crisis, 2018

LaToya Ruby Frazier asks for justice for the communities in Flint, Michigan, with a flag that reminds us of the number of days residents have been living without water as of April 25th, 2018. The photograph is from her 2016 work Flint is Family, where Frazier spent five months with three generations of Flint women who suffer and still thrive as they face the water crisis in Flint–“the worst man-made environmental catastrophe in recent national memory.”

Frazier states: “The number 1,462 is the exact amount of days Flint residents have lived without new pipes since the lead leaching took place. (And yes, that is a real photograph I took in Flint, where they were keeping locked up pipes behind barbed wire.)
Exact location and company:
American Pipe
4906 Horton Avenue, Flint MI 48505″

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s FLINT, 1,462 days and counting man-made water crisis is on view April 25th – May 16th, 2018 at:
– Creative Time Headquarters, 59 East 4th Street, NY, NY
– 21C Museum Hotel Durham, 111 Corcoran St, Durham, NC
– Atlanta Contemporary, 535 Means Street, NW, Atlanta, GA
– The Commons, in partnership with the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1340 Jayhawk Blvd, Lawrence, KS
– Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, 114 Central Ave, Ithaca, NY
– John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, Brown University, 357 Benefit Street, Providence, RI
– KMAC Museum, 715 W Main St, Louisville, KY
– MASS MoCA, 1040 Mass MoCA Way, North Adams, MA
– Mann Library, Ag Quad, Cornell University, 237 Mann Drive, Ithaca, NY
– Mid-America Arts Alliance, 2018 Baltimore Ave, Kansas City, MO
– Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 4454 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI
– RISD Museum, 224 Benefit Street, Providence, RI
– SPACE, 536 Congress Street, Portland, ME
– Texas State Galleries, 233 West Sessom Drive, San Marcos, TX
– The Union for Contemporary Art, 2423 N 24th Street, Omaha, NE
– University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum, 3821 USF Holly Drive, Tampa, FL
– Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, 71 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, NJ

 

Read more…

Courtesy of: CreativeTime.org

A Matter of Life & Death – “Leading Edge” segment on PBS News Hour

Leading Edge PBS News Hour

“Leading Edge” segment on PBS News Hour. Photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier.

PBS News Hour
April 18, 2018
Judy Woodruff and Amna Nawaz, PBS News Hour
Linda Villarosa, contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine
Monica Simpson, executive director of Sistersong
Photographs by LaToya Ruby Frazier

Why are black mothers and infants far more likely to die in U.S. from pregnancy-related causes?

Judy Woodruff:

The United States has a problem with maternal mortality, and it’s one that’s been getting worse.

The U.S. is one of only 13 countries where the death rate is worse now than it was 25 years ago, and among the worst of wealthiest countries in the world. Between 700 and 900 American women die each year from problems related to pregnancy, childbirth or complications up to a year later.

There are as many as 50,000 cases annually where women face dangerous and even life-threatening situations.

As part of our ongoing series Race Matters, Amna Nawaz looks at why it is dramatically worse among African-American women.

It’s the focus of this week’s segment the Leading Edge.

Amna Nawaz:

And the statistics are stunning. Black infants are more than twice as likely to die than white infants, a racial disparity that is wider today than in 1850, 15 years before the end of slavery. And black women are three to four times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.

For a closer look at what’s behind those numbers, we turn to Linda Villarosa. Her in-depth report on the subject ran in “The New York Times Magazine.” And Monica Simpson, executive director of SisterSong, the country’s largest organization dedicated to reproductive justice for women of color. In 2014, she testified before the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Linda and Monica, welcome to the “NewsHour.”

Watch the segment or read the full transcript

Courtesy of: PBS News Hour

Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis

LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New York Times.

Kingston weighed in at a healthy 6 pounds 13 ounces. Credit: LaToya Ruby Frazier for The New York Times

The New York Times
April 9, 2018
by Linda Villarosa

The answer to the disparity in death rates has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America.

In 1850, when the death of a baby was simply a fact of life, and babies died so often that parents avoided naming their children before their first birthdays, the United States began keeping records of infant mortality by race. That year, the reported black infant-mortality rate was 340 per 1,000; the white rate was 217 per 1,000. This black-white divide in infant mortality has been a source of both concern and debate for over a century. In his 1899 book, “The Philadelphia Negro,” the first sociological case study of black Americans, W.E.B. Du Bois pointed to the tragedy of black infant death and persistent racial disparities. He also shared his own “sorrow song,” the death of his baby son, Burghardt, in his 1903 masterwork, “The Souls of Black Folk.”

From 1915 through the 1990s, amid vast improvements in hygiene, nutrition, living conditions and health care, the number of babies of all races who died in the first year of life dropped by over 90 percent — a decrease unparalleled by reductions in other causes of death. But that national decline in infant mortality has since slowed. In 1960, the United States was ranked 12th among developed countries in infant mortality. Since then, with its rate largely driven by the deaths of black babies, the United States has fallen behind and now ranks 32nd out of the 35 wealthiest nations. Low birth weight is a key factor in infant death, and a new report released in March by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin suggests that the number of low-birth-weight babies born in the United States — also driven by the data for black babies — has inched up for the first time in a decade.

Read more…

Courtesy of: The New York Times

LaToya Ruby Frazier at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise New York

LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A mother and her son speaking to a news-reporter outside North Western High School (est. 1964) awaiting the arrival of President Barack Obama, May 4th 2016 Flint MI 2016, 2016/17, gelatin silver print, 20 by 24 inches; at Gavin Brown’s enterprise.

Art in America Magazine
April 1, 2018
by David Markus

The hallmark of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographic work has been its blend of the political and the everyday. Often cited as an heir to Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, she uses her artistic practice to advocate for racial and economic justice, particularly on the part of communities blighted by deindustrialization. Frazier began photographing her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, when she was still a teenager, producing a series of photographs that would help earn her a 2015 MacArthur fellowship. Over the years her photography has brought her as far afield as Belgium, where she created a series centered on a former coal-mining community in the Borinage region. For her recent survey exhibition, she covered the exterior of Gavin Brown’s four-story gallery in Harlem with a forty-by-twenty-foot vinyl print of three vertically arranged photographs, each depicting a single word spelled out in water bottles inserted into a chain-link fence alongside a commercial thruway in Flint, Michigan. Together, the words read, WATER IS LIFE. It’s an SOS from the Midwestern town that has become an emblem of gross municipal negligence in this era of extreme inequality.

Read more…

Courtesy of: Art in America Magazine

The Atlantic Explores King’s Legacy Through a Contemporary Lens

with Contributions From LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kara Walker

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER’s aerial photographs of Memphis, Chicago, and Baltimore, are featured in a six-page photo essay exploring how the cities have fared through five decades of oppression since King’s assassination.

Culture Type
March 24, 2018
by Victoria Valentine

The year 2018 coincides with many historic milestones. It’s been a half century since the Studio Museum in Harlem was founded, the Chicago artist collective AFRICOBRA was formed, Olympic track athletes raised their fists at the Mexico City games in a stand for racial justice, and the Kerner Commission was released and declared the United States was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” All of these occurrences spoke to the times and state of American culture.

This year also marks another clarion call: The 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights leader was killed April 4, 1968, in Memphis.

A special issue  published by The Atlantic marks the anniversary. The magazine, whose early contributors included Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W.E.B Du Bois, considers the legacy of King through a contemporary lens. The project was envisioned by two African American staffers—writer Vann R. Newkirk II and managing editor Adrienne Green.

[…]

MLK Special Issue from The Atlantic

 

Contributors also include National Book Award-winning author Jesymn Ward; Pulitzer Prizie-winner Matthew Desmond, author of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City”; filmmaker and activist Bree Newsome; and artists LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kara Walker, among others.

Integrating the work of Walker and Frazier with the contributions of journalists, scholars, historians, and authors, demonstrates how contemporary artists are interrogating socioeconomic issues with the same rigor as their counterparts and playing a valuable role in the discourse on the history of racial ills in America and the future of democracy.

In her practice, Frazier uses social documentary photography, video, and performance to shine a light racial justice and human rights issues. She is recognized for her images of Braddock, Pa., where she was born and raised. The town’s economic fortunes rose and fell with the steel industry, which also left the community, including her own family, reeling with health issues. More recently, she has documented how people in Flint, Mich., are coping with the city’s water crisis.

Read more…

Courtesy of: Culture Type