Intimate Debris: Nature, Industry, And The Body

ArtSlant
November 30, 2017
by Jessica Lanay

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photography braids together the intimacies between landscape, industry, and the Black woman’s body. Impactful, private, and silver ensconced, her images reveal a sometimes wonderful and other times tragic interdependency. In two recent Pittsburgh exhibitions—The Notion of Family at Silver Eye Center for Photography and On The Making Of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford at the August Wilson Center, a shared exhibition of photography by Frazier and Sandra Gould Ford—Frazier captures the interconnectivity between the landscape and the body and how the elements of one penetrate the other: “I believe that the history of a place is written on the body of its inhabitants and their environment,” Frazier says. “Often in my photographs, whether it’s a landscape of a house or an aerial view of railroads or a steel mill, I see the landscape as a portrait, a portrait of the body.”

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Courtesy of: ArtSlant

Frazier and artist Sandra Gould Ford honor working-class life

Pittsburgh City Paper
November 29, 2017
by Bill O’Driscoll

In 1977, while studying at the University of Pittsburgh, Sandra Gould Ford took the first of a series of clerical jobs at J&L Steel. That was five years before LaToya Ruby Frazier was born. But upon meeting, in 2015, the two women connected immediately: They were both African-American artists from Pittsburgh committed to honoring the often-forgotten experience of the working class.

The exhibit On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford, a collaboration on display at the August Wilson Center, offers a strikingly layered narrative: Acclaimed photographer Frazier tells the story of Gould, and how she told the story of Big Steel and its demise here.

Frazier is a Braddock native and MacArthur “genius-grant” winner who now splits time between Pittsburgh, New York and Chicago. Working with the Silver Eye Center for Photography (and a grant from the Pittsburgh Foundation), she spent this past August in Ford’s Homewood home and studio, poring over Ford’s remarkable (and previously unexhibited) archive of photographs she took and documents she saved at J&L’s South Side and Hazelwood plants. Ford worked for J&L until the plants were shuttered, in 1985. “They were throwing these documents away,” says Frazier. “She understood the cultural significance of it.” Together with Frazier’s own photographs of Ford, and of the former mill sites as they are today, the materials comprise Steel Genesis.

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Courtesy of: Pittsburgh City Paper

Spike Lee Reinvents His Debut in Netflix’s Superb Comedy

Photo by David Lee/Netflix

Collider
November 23, 2017
by Chris Cabin

‘She’s Gotta Have It’ Review

Not unlike Twin Peaks: The Return, Spike Lee‘s new Netflix comedy series, She’s Gotta Have It, simultaneously represents a summation and an expansion of the legendary filmmaker’s style and thematic obsessions. And like David Lynch, Lee has returned to his origins to push his art forward, reinventing his groundbreaking 1986 debut of the same name. The crucial difference is that where Lynch has continued to venture into the unknown and otherworldly, Lee has fully embraced the here and now, indulging stylistic notions that reflect memes and hashtags as well as a revitalized focus on toxic masculinity, the rampant gentrification of New York City, and the gig economy.

It’s also a series that is unapologetically black and proud. In detailing the life of Nola Darling (DeWanda Wise), a young Fort Green artist who works a number of odd jobs to make ends meet, Lee conveys a potent love for black artists and intellectuals from all corners of the spectrum, and is not timid in his celebration. In one scene, a lyricist on the soundtrack lists famed black icons from the five boroughs, from the late, great Gregory Hines to hip-hop legends the Fat Boys, and Lee lets each name appear and fade on the screen. On a date, Nola’s most business-minded suitor, Jamie Overstreet (Lyriq Bent), gifts her a copy of Claudia Rankine‘s “Citizen” and later on, Darling speaks about the influence of painter Kerry James Washington and the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier on her work with Opal Gilstrap (Ilfenesh Hadera), her friend and occasional lover.

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Courtesy of: Collider

In Search of the American Family

LENS New York Times
November 20, 2017
by Rena Silverman

Every November, mothers, fathers and siblings link arms and tap dance straight into the holiday season. Gathered around the glow of a fireplace or at a packed table for turkey dinner, generations bound by blood, marriage — or even a good Sondheim song — impart wisdom and gifts to their offspring. And every new smile, no matter how different, is greeted with kindness and acceptance.

Hardly.

In a #notfilter world of Instagram-less gatherings, the traditional family is far more complex. Thanksgiving tables are part battlefield, part stage. And a quick look around will reveal not only who is present but who is not. And in the case of the photographers in (Un)expected Families, opening Dec. 9 at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the parentheses hold a lot of weight.

“In a number of instances, the person missing from the picture is the photographer,” said Karen Haas, the museum’s photography curator. And while the exhibition — which includes photos by LaToya Ruby Frazier, Harry Callahan, Nan Goldin and Duane Michals — highlights socio-economic polarities, “affluent and destitute, cohesive and fractured, expected and unexpected,” the spectrum of gazes, absences and appearances made by the photographers among families — their own or others’ — feels even stronger.

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Courtesy of: LENS New York times

Frazier Continues Gordon Parks’ Documentary Photography

Unrated
November 13, 2017
by Vanessa Feder

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an established visual artist who blends her creative eye with personal accounts by way of diverse mediums including film, performance and photography. While she has received a BFA in applied media arts, her MFA in art photography and is currently an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Frazier’s bold imagery speaks beyond her academic accolades and accomplishments. Channeling the legacy of multi-talented artist and visual pioneer Gordon Parks, Frazier has taken her lived and learned experiences and turned them into visible pieces of social critiques and authentic, documentary portrayals.

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Courtesy of: Unrated

Photographer documents industry’s creeping effect on health of town

Frazier took this image by helicopter of industrial waste encroaching on a Braddock home.

Cambridge Day
November 12, 2017
by Marc Levy

Photographer and video artist LaToya Ruby Frazier spent a dozen years on a project documenting the effects of industry on Braddock, Pa., and its health, environment and people. But it was an easy investment of time to make; it’s her hometown.

In a town literally centered around a Carnegie steel mill, where socioeconomic power is just as literally arranged from top to bottom, Frazier and her family live in the neighborhood called “The Bottom.” From there, she has taken intimate shots of her family members as they live and die, and taken to the skies in a rented helicopter to capture the choking encroachment of new industry on people’s homes – including ominous shots of stark white barrels of waste stacked outside yard fencing like zombies outside a weakening barrier on “The Walking Dead.”

“Three hundred acres of sprawling industry are still expanding, block by block, taking over The Bottom,” Frazier told Wired’s Laura Mallonee in 2015. “And that’s dangerous, because the residents live next to that.”

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Courtesy of: Cambridge Day