The Art World: What If…?!
by Allan Schwartzman and Charlotte Burns

Segment aired on May 9, 2024

We’re joined by the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, just before the opening of her major new exhibition ‘Monuments of Solidarity’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “This exhibition spiritually uplifts people,” she says. “It inspires people to be the change they need, but it also inspires them to be better human beings. To look beyond the self, to look beyond individualistic desires, to think about the fact that you are connected to an ecosystem and a world around you. People won’t be the same. This is a transformative exhibition.” We delve into LaToya’s faith and the impact of art on our lives, its power not only to shine light into the darkness, but to move through people and communities and so to create profound, lasting change. Enjoy.

New York Times
by Siddhartha Mitter
Reporting from Braddock and Pittsburgh, Pa.

She may be America’s foremost social documentary photographer, now with a survey at the Museum of Modern Art. “All I’m doing is showing up as a vessel.”

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The photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier creating a self-portrait in Braddock, Pa., her hometown, at the site of a footbridge over the railroad. The bridge had been torn down, but she decided to make the portrait anyway. Photo credit: Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times

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A continuous high-pitched din — a bit whirring, a bit crunching — echoed over the Bottom, the residential sliver of Braddock, Pa., nearest to the industrial plants and the Monongahela River. It rose, indistinguishably, from the steel mill — the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, opened by Andrew Carnegie in 1875 and still operating — and the adjacent air separation plant, where gasses are piped into the mill or liquefied for shipment.

Also borne on the breeze was an unmissable acrid smell. It hung in the atmosphere on a Monday morning in April, over Washington Street. Not much was going on: Braddock, near Pittsburgh, had more than 20,000 inhabitants a century ago but now has fewer than 2,000. Still, some young people — Black, like four-fifths of the residents today — clustered around the Living Water Church, where a hearse parked outside indicated that a funeral was underway.

As I walked with the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier — who grew up on Washington Street and made there the documentary work about her family, at once poetic and unflinching, that cemented her reputation — my nose and throat started to tingle.

“Oh yeah,” Frazier said. “The longer you’re here, the heavier it’s going to get.”

Braddock has a history of high levels of air pollution and respiratory disorders, as well as infant mortality. Pollution from the steel mill remains a public health concern: In 2022, U.S. Steel, which owns the plant, agreed to a $1.5 million fine and promised improvements in a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency and county health authorities.

Frazier has the autoimmune disease lupus. “I shouldn’t be down here too long, because my health has been so adversely affected,” she said.

The smell thickened as we neared the factories. The gas plant occupies the site of Talbot Towers, the public housing complex where Frazier’s family lived when she was born, in 1982, and that was torn down in 1990. Across the street sits the brick husk of another church, where she attended Bible study. An inscription on its facade — “You must be born again! Of water and spirit” — has appeared in her photographs.

“It’s almost like an out-of-body experience, right?” Frazier said over the noise, as brightly painted coal tipper trucks turned into the factory gates.

“But this is what I felt and knew as a kid. I always had a feeling as a little girl that there were two realms. The physical realm — yes, we’re on Washington Street, walking toward the steel mill — but then there was the spiritual realm. That these spiritual forces were always surrounding me — just like the history.”

Frazier’s “Edgar Thomson Plant and The Bottom,” from the project “A Despoliation of Water: From the Housatonic to the Monongahela River (1930-2013).” Frazier used a helicopter to make images that conveyed the impact of industry in the landscape. via LaToya Ruby Frazier and Gladstone gallery

This weekend, Frazier’s survey exhibition, titled “Monuments of Solidarity,” opens at the Museum of Modern Art. At 42, she may be America’s foremost social documentary photographer now. Her work charts the experience of working-class people around the country as they face compounding challenges of deindustrialization, environmental degradation and inequality. Through it all, her hometown Braddock remains her best template for understanding the world.

She first made her mark with “The Notion of Family” (2001-14). It portrayed over many years her grandmother Ruby, who raised her; her step-great-grandfather, known as Gramps; and her mother, Cynthia, notably in jointly composed mother-daughter portraits. Autobiographical and interior, the work gradually opened to Braddock’s battered terrain and the local activists resisting its decline. It earned Frazier inclusion in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2015.

“Grandma Ruby and Me,” from the series “The Notion of Family,” 2005, which established Frazier as a photographer and will be part of her survey at the Museum of Modern Art. via LaToya Ruby Frazier and Gladstone gallery

After that, she widened her field. In “Flint Is Family” (2016-20), she chronicled over years how some residents of Flint, Mich., coped with the water crisis that began in 2014 when authorities switched the public supply to the polluted Flint River. It has yet to be resolved.

In 2019, she spent nine months with members of the United Auto Workers in Lordstown, Ohio, after General Motors abruptly announced the closure of its plant there. Her project, which began as a commission for The New York Times Magazine, expanded into “The Last Cruze,” an installation of photographs, video and text interviews of some 60 workers — diverse by race, gender and age — that premiered at the Renaissance Society in Chicago.

And during the pandemic, she spent weeks in Baltimore photographing Black and working-class community health workers who deployed in the city to connect a vulnerable population to medical and support services. “More Than Conquerors,” featuring dozens of these workers and in some cases their families, received the top prize in the Carnegie International exhibition in 2022.

Installation view of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity,” at MoMA, recalls an automobile assembly line. Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Gathering these and other projects, the MoMA survey traces, for the first time in one place, Frazier’s journey toward this kind of civic polyphony. Her portraits of individuals or groups are collaboratively posed in homes, parks and workplaces. Accompanying them are extensive interviews that she conducts herself and excerpts, often at length, in her photo books and exhibition displays.

She opens space, as well, for grass-roots artists. In Flint, two poets, Amber Hasan and Shea Cobb, became her confidants and local entree. In a video Cobb, a school bus driver by day, delivers a forceful poem, then narrates Frazier’s images. In Lordstown, Kasey King, an auto worker and U.A.W. photographer, shot inside the plant — where Frazier was denied access — as the last Chevrolet Cruze moved through production. The slide show of those often emotional images, with King narrating, runs nearly one hour.

Frazier’s subject matter locates her in the engagé tradition that includes Lewis Hine, who photographed notably in Pittsburgh in the early 20th century; Dorothea Lange; Walker Evans; or one of her great inspirations, Gordon Parks. But her methods expand this canon, said Roxana Marcoci, the MoMA senior curator who organized “Monuments of Solidarity” with Caitlin Ryan, an assistant curator, and Antoinette D. Roberts, a curatorial assistant.

“Like Parks, she sees the camera lens as a radical tool for resistance,” Marcoci said. But by “centering on the act of looking after and listening to the people whom she is representing in her work,” Marcoci added, Frazier’s projects invite viewers to think alongside them, rather than regard them as subjects.

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Read more…

Courtesy of: New York Times

MoMA Magazine
by Roxana Marcoci

Read an excerpt from the LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity exhibition catalogue.

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Momme from The Notion of Family. 2008. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier.

“From the very beginning, I have always been working with other women artists who are not seen as artists or as a part of this art world,” LaToya Ruby Frazier stated in a 2019 conversation with playwright Lynn Nottage. “I am intentionally collaborating with them and then giving their work a platform. It’s my mission: advocating for other women artists. Every single body of work, I’ve done it.” Over more than two decades, Frazier has mapped a web of relations and social dynamics, reaching across generations to ensure that the lives of creative working-class women are seen and their voices are heard. For her 2024 survey exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Frazier has reconceived her distinct bodies of work as a sequence of multimedia installations that she calls “monuments for workers’ thoughts.” More than merely reviving the past, her commemorations and celebrations of the ongoing labor, resilience, and creativity of working women act as a guidebook for action, a model for sisterly unity in the face of inequity and injustice.

Frazier joins a counterhegemonic chorus of artists and poets who uphold Black women’s stories of resistance and solidarity. This lineage includes the artist Kara Walker, whose 2014 public project A Subtlety—a massive, sugarcoated statue combining the traits of Sphinx and archetypal mammy—bears an extended title:

the Marvelous Sugar Baby
an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined
our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World
on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.

Walker pays tribute to the overlooked creative agency of enslaved people, which took root even within the most inhumane of labor systems. Her description of the victims of slavery as “unpaid and overworked Artisans” radically reorients the histories of American art and labor, much as Frazier’s partnership with women artists who have gone unrecognized as such implicitly revalues the artistic canon. It is not surprising that the women with whom Frazier collaborates are often from blue-collar backgrounds; this accords with another key element of her art and activism: the drive to imagine a mode of progressive, living solidarity among those affected by environmental racism, industrialization and deindustrialization, health-care disparities, and the continuing violations of workers’ and human rights under global capitalism.

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Zion, Her Mother Shea, and Her Grandfather Mr. Smiley Riding on Their Tennessee Walking Horses, Mares, P.T. (P.T.’s Miss One Of A Kind), Dolly (Secretly), and Blue (Blue’s Royal Threat), Newton, Mississippi from Flint Is Family in Three Acts. 2017–19. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

In a 2022 keynote address at the Museum, Frazier stated, “It is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo-essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and historical amnesia.” Growing up “in a household with a retired Black steel mill worker, my Grandma Ruby’s stepfather, who I called Gramps,” Frazier noted in a recent conversation with Marxist geographer David Harvey, “created my desire to see statues of working-class people instead of industrial capitalists.” Rather than honoring the powerful, the artist’s alternative monuments recognize the histories, contributions, and lives of a multiracial working class from across a geographic spectrum: Braddock, Pennsylvania; Flint, Michigan; the Borinage mining region in Belgium; Lordstown, Ohio; Baltimore, Maryland; Delano, California. Moreover, the worker is not an allegorical figure: individuals, in solidarity with a larger collective, represent themselves. Open-ended, living, and relational, Frazier’s installations, through engagement with the viewer, are designed to awaken action. The artist proposes a world, in the words of Walt Whitman, “where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Mary A. Williams, Tuklor’s Mother, Holding the Water Hose at the Atmospheric Water Generator on North Saginaw Street Between East Marengo Avenue and East Pulaski Avenue, Flint, Michigan from Flint Is Family in Three Acts. 2019–20. © 2024 LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery

Speaking to Frazier of the role memory plays in radical politics, Harvey outlined a dictum from the novelist Honoré de Balzac: “Hope is a memory that desires.” Monuments—as encapsulations of memory—are not always expressions of hopeful desire, but what if they were? “The historical role of memory,” Harvey elaborated, “the historical role of what people have done in the past becomes a powerful political force when merged with contemporary desires for a better life.” With this in mind, we might ask whether the monument as a genre, understood in new ways, could hasten the demise of structural forms of violence and oppression. Contemplating the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC, and other American sites of memory, scholar Sarah Lewis observes, “If we are to understand which narratives about race and citizenship are created by monuments, we need to focus on considering their temporality anew. Do they historicize events or do they signal a narrative of futurity, an order, a narrative that will define a path of civic life?” Frazier’s installations, while preserving histories, open horizons of possibility for an antiracist future. They are oriented toward what Lewis (quoting Black feminist theorist Tina Campt) describes as that which “should be true . . . striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present.”

Want to read more? Pick up a copy of LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity.

Courtesy of: MoMA.org