Frazier at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise Harlem through February 25th, 2018

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Andrea Holding her daughter Nephratiti outside the Social Network Banquet Hall (2016 / 2017), all images via Gavin Brown’s

Art Observed
February 12, 2018
by O.C. Yerebakan

Frazier at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise Harlem
In her self-titled solo debut at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, artist LaToya Ruby Frazier illustrates an American landscape where dualities intertwine, marring the boundaries separating joy from despair or abundance from nothingness. Her depictions of secluded interiors, occupied by domestic clutters and family histories translate into stories of struggle, while barren deserts under the California sun encapsulate human ardor. Spanning her two decade photographic practice, Frazier’s three-floor presentation at the gallery’s spacious Harlem location introduces one series on each floor. Complimented by the accents of the building’s previous life as a brewery, the photographer’s black and white gelatin silver prints explore dichotomies of public and private, meditating on the role of the camera lens as a witness of our profound and collective moments, be those experienced firsthand or communally mediated.

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Courtesy of: Art Observed

Like Goya Turning His Eye Toward the Struggles and Triumphs of Black America

Photo: LaToya Ruby Frazier/Courtesy the Artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise; New York / Rome.

 

 

Vulture
February 9, 2018
by Jerry Saltz

In the searingly honest, empathetic documentary images of self-described “artist, curator, educator, and photographer” LaToya Ruby Frazier, I see the rotten social malignancy that perpetuates entrenched racial discrimination that is deeply inscribed into law, lending, and health-care policies.

I also see obdurate white tribalism, the 55 percent of all white people and 75 percent of all Republicans who think that racial discrimination persists … but that it’s against white people.

I look at Frazier’s beautiful activist art — depictions of people with the courage and strength to live life amid Trumpian statecraft and everything that made it possible and consistent with our often-airbrushed history — and I behold an aesthetic passionate enough to possibly jar the art world from its ten-year fixation on insular formalist photography-about-photography. The films, texts, and photographs of this 2015 MacArthur “genius” give us one of the strongest artists to emerge in this country this century — a 36-year-old oracle calling for a new engaged “movement in photography” that bears witness to our state-sanctioned economic racism and environmental horrors.

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Courtesy of: Vulture

 

Community, Corrosion, and the Flint Water Crisis

Shea and Zion at the Badawest Restaurant on Corruna Road (2016–2017)

The Village Voice
January 26, 2018
by Siddhartha Mitter

In early 2016, the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier spent five months in Flint, Michigan. The city — a deindustrialized shell long past its automotive glory days — was reeling from the water crisis that began two years before, when a state-appointed emergency manager decided to save money by drawing water from the heavily polluted Flint River. The poorly treated water, catastrophically high in lead, made residents severely ill and degraded local pipes. By the time Frazier arrived, Flint had reconnected to the Detroit water system, but the corrosion had left the water suspect, and public trust in government officials was demolished.

In Flint, Frazier embedded with Shea Cobb, a young school bus driver and poet, her daughter Zion, and her mother, Renée. Flint Is Family, the resulting black-and-white portfolio, depicts the water crisis — where just brushing one’s teeth is a resource decision with health and cost implications — from the point of view of this resilient matrilineage. It is the core of Frazier’s vital three-part exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, in Harlem, and a masterclass in collaborative work based on attention and intimacy. When President Obama came to Flint in May 2016 — the zenith of media attention to the crisis — Frazier was around, but she didn’t go to see him. Instead she visited with Shea’s aunt Denise and uncle Rodney, watching the president’s appearance in the gentle clutter of their family room. In her photograph, Denise and Rodney stand as they watch Obama, onscreen, take a sip of Flint water. They face three-quarters away from Frazier’s lens, leaving us to divine from their posture what they make of the scene.

Two days later, Frazier documented the wedding of Cobb’s niece Nephratiti. “Nobody thinks about water crises in marriage,” Cobb comments in a montage that screens in the show. “You don’t think about lead pipes and poison, all you think about is love and the bride and the groom.” The ceremony, in Frazier’s capture, is a bolt of joy rending the fluorescent tedium of the courthouse setting. She portrays Cobb with Zion and Ms. Renée outside the reception. Though her images also show us protesters in hazmat suits, a home vacated because of contamination, the city of Flint water plant — Frazier rented a helicopter to get aerial views — the experience is rigorously, empathically grounded in the life of this one family.

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Courtesy of: The Village Voice

LaToya Ruby Frazier At Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, NYC

“LaToya Ruby Frazier. Mom and Me on Her Couch. 2010” ©2018 LaToya Ruby Frazier

Forbes Magazine
January 24, 2018
by Clayton Press

Art can be as normal as life, but how lives are lived is infinitely variable, defying definitions of normalcy. The artistic life of LaToya Ruby Frazier has been well documented almost to the point of journalistic recycling. It is difficult to add to the facts and flavors. She began photographing her family at 16, gradually opening her lens to include her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, population 2,100, an impoverished Rust Belt borough outside of Pittsburgh. […]

While Frazier’s photography is frequently and understandably linked to the work of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks, it reaches farther precisely because Frazier is both documentarian and committed activist. Few artists choose this path and do it successfully, especially early in their careers. Martha Rosler, for one, has consistently connected life and art as an advocate activist.

Effectively, Frazier’s exhibition is a retrospective in three interrelated parts, but not presented in chronological order. Start in the middle on Floor 2 with The Notion of Family. It is a 13-year photographic document of Frazier in and a part of a three-generation Black matriarchy in Braddock. She is there, front and center with her grandmother and mother, participating in family life. Her black and white analog photographs are rich with everyday banality like a refrigerator plastered with magnets, photos and coloring book pictures and crowned with cereal boxes (Grandma Ruby’s Refrigerator, 2007). There are emotionally drained, yet palpable, portraits like daughter and mother anchoring opposite ends of the living room sofa (Mom and Me on Her Couch, 2010). […]

The exhibition is hardly static. There is an extensive program of art-making workshops, panel discussions and performances. True to her “manifesto,” Frazier is using the gallery space to record history; heighten public health awareness; examine the legacy of Purifoy; discuss the Flint ecological crisis, and entertain with a performance by The Sister Tour.

Gavin Brown’s enterprise, 439 W. 127th Street, New York

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Courtesy of: Forbes Art & Entertainment

Photographs Tell the Stories of Forgotten Americans

LaToya Ruby Frazier, installation view of “A Message in Nestle Water Bottles from Shea Cobb, Amber Hasan, Macana Roxie and LaToya Ruby Frazier at Sussex Drive and West Pierson Road, Flint MI” (2017-18). Photo by Thomas Müller.

Artsy
January 18, 2018
By Antwaun Sargent

Since the age of 17—when she shot her first photograph, using a 35mm camera, of her mother at a bar in her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania—LaToya Ruby Frazier has been documenting the dignity, hope, and perseverance of working-class black life in the midst of crisis and decline. A new exhibition at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem weaves together three bodies of work (“The Notion of Family,” “Flint Is Family,” and “A Pilgrimage To Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum”) that engage with pressing social issues—from the fundamental need for clean water, to the way racism can inform economics, the environment, and healthcare. Frazier’s images of the American heartland’s black working class pay witness to deep devastation and tiny, pyrrhic triumphs.

Hanging on the red brick facade of the gallery is a triptych of three large-scale photographs taken last November by the MacArthur “Genius” grant-winning photographer and storyteller. They show a fence standing in a Flint, Michigan, field with three words spelled out in clear white lettering: “WATER IS LIFE.” The billboard-style installation, entitled A Message in Nestle Water Bottles from Shea Cobb, Amber Hasan, Macana Roxie and LaToya Ruby Frazier at Sussex Drive and West Pierson Road, Flint MI (2017–18) is a way of speaking of that small, post-industrial city’s ongoing water crisis.

“If you want to learn the history about a place, all you have to do is look at its inhabitants,” Frazier told Artsy, standing surrounded by her “Flint is Family” (2016–17) series inside the gallery. The images were shot on assignment for Elle magazine, and were inspired both by the artist’s college mentor, Kathe Kowalski—a firm believer in long-term social documentary work—and the mid-century reportage of Gordon Parks, namely his 1967 photo essay, “A Harlem Family.”

“Whenever I’m making a portrait,” says Frazier, and its subjects are “looking back at me, showing their dignity and pride and humanity, they are a marker on the timeline of history.”

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Courtesy of: Artsy

An Artist’s Provocative Photos of Family Life in a Damaged Town

LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Momme” 2018.

Vice
January 17, 2018
by Sarah Valdez

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s affecting new work casts an unflinching look at the effects of pollution.

It’s beyond rare that a young artist’s first solo show happens after she’s earned a MacArthur “genius” grant, but such is the case with LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose work is on view now at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise. Frazier received the prestigious award in 2015 at the age of 33, having already wowed audiences with searing black-and-white photographs taken in her highly polluted hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Mainly portraits of herself and her family, these affectionate depictions often illustrate health problems caused to their subjects by their surroundings. From this insider’s perspective, Frazier says she “spirals out,” meaning not that she loses control, but rather that she starts with a tight focus and gradually pulls away to reveal the bigger picture.

Frazier cements her affinity for Rust Belt towns suffering the environmental and medical consequences of waste in another series, Flint Is Family, In the titular Michigan city, pollution originates with the automotive and chemical industries, coal mining, and agriculture; in Braddock, it consists primarily of lead, bad air, and toxic runoff from steel mills. In both locations, the consequences have been more than a century in the making, and continue to devastate poor black communities whose concerns are consistently overlooked. […]

The Notion of Family, another body of work in the show, is perhaps the epicenter of Frazier’s spiral, and relates to the artist and her blood kin, mainly her mother and grandmother. In Lupus Attack, however, Frazier sits alone, topless on a bed—sexualized, surrounded by sheets, more than a bit confrontational—perhaps in need of rest due to illness, and too angry to rest. She pointedly does not avert her eyes. Frazier’s mother’s scarred spine also occupies another arresting shot. A wall text tells us that she suffers from an unidentified neurological disorder, and has had a number of cysts removed. […]

In the show’s final series, Frazier reaches still further on her outwardly spiraling journey. For A Pilgrimage to Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum (2016/2017), the artist traveled to California to take outdoor installation shots of work by a seminal black assemblage artist who cobbled together objects like tires and toilets that other people deemed junk. And while the resultant images, like Purifoy’s objects themselves, might be overlooked as ephemeral, there’s much to be considered here for those interested in thinking about precisely where the line demarcating true value resides.

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LaToya Ruby Frazier is on view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Harlem, through 2/25/18.

Courtesy of: Vice Garage