Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Lecture

LaToya Ruby Frazier

March 23, 2017, 6:00 pm
FREE – Seating is limited

LaToya Ruby Frazier, a contemporary Chicago-based photographer and the 2017 recipient of the Akron Art Museum’s Knight Purchase Award, will visit Akron to present the Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Lecture at the Akron Art Museum.

Akron Art Museum
For Frazier, art is a catalyst for social justice. Her photographs and videos document America today: post-industrial cities riven by poverty, racism, healthcare inequality and environmental toxicity. Bridging personal realities with broader social issues, her haunting artworks amplify the voices of the most vulnerable and transform our sense of place and self. Frazier’s first book, The Notion of Family, received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award. Frazier has received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally.

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Musee Magazine Interviews LaToya Ruby Frazier for Women’s History Month

LaToya Ruby Frazier A Lived Experience

Describing a picture of yours from A Haunted Capital, you said that you watched The Cosby Show as a kid in order to escape the reality of your dismantled working-class family. When did you come to terms with the truth and what led you to embrace and document it?

“I was always aware of my plight and displacement. I am from an area known as “the bottom.” Braddock is on an incline, the further you are up the hill the higher your social and economic status. Through my Grandma Ruby’s discipline I learned that my only way up was through my education, academically and creatively. When I met my photography mentor Kathe Kowalski at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, she encouraged me and taught me the value in making work about Braddock, my grandmother, mother and myself. All of these things led to my embracement to produce the work.”

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LaToya Ruby Frazier Photo: Bret Hartman/TED

Portrait by Bret Hartman
Interview courtesy of Musee Magazine

LaToya speaking at SPE

SPE“The Notion of Family”

Thursday, March 09, 2017
Guest Speaker LaToya Ruby Frazier at 7:00pm – Orange Ballroom
Book signing at 8:00pm – Orange Foyer

In this talk, LaToya Ruby Frazier discusses how she has used photography to fight injustice—poverty, healthcare and gender inequality, environmental contamination, racism, and more—and create a more representative self-portrait. Drawing from her book, “The Notion of Family” as well as from works of art by Gordon Parks with Ralph Ellison, August Sander, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Langston Hughes, she relates her conscious approach to photography, opens up more authentic ways to talk about family, inheritance, and place, and celebrates the inspirational, transformative power of images.

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Exhibition at Caracas Belgium

LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982, USA) continues to show the representation of the working classes, a tradition begun in the 1930s by the likes of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Gordon Parks, in her latest exhibition Et des terrils un arbre s’elevera (And a tree grew up from the coal tips). Her political commitment and her fight against social inequalities are depicted through her photographs, which are now on exhibit at Caracas Belgium until May 21, 2017.

Latoya Ruby Frazier - Impact of Industry at Caracas Belgium

Frazier’s images show her examination of the history of the Borinage, a region whose fate and inhabitants, like those of her own family, have been greatly impacted by the collapse of heavy industry. Through encounters with former miners and their families, Frazier bears witness to their life experiences through the photographs made jointly with them. Long interviews preceded the various encounters that brought to light a series of details and anecdotes. These then enabled the artist to structure the photographs that she subsequently took; the places, objects and directions of gazes were determined by the stories she was told.

By: Matthew Barlow. Courtesy of: GUP Magazine

Carrying the Legacies of Documentary Photographer Icons

Lomography Magazine on LaToya Ruby Frazier’s recent exhibition at the Musée des Arts Contemporains, Le Grand Hornu in Brussels.

“The recent history of Braddock, a district in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has been plagued with issues of unemployment surges, poverty, demographic migration, disease outbreaks, hospital closures, drug use in the countryside. It is referenced to the lower part of the city, the poorest and closest to the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, known for the steel factory of Andrew Carnegie.”

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Courtesy of: Lomography.com

Musée des Arts Contemporains

LaToya Ruby Frazier, And From The Coaltips A Tree Will Rise

Outraged by the closure of Braddock’s only hospital in 2010 and by the following use of this “ghost town” as the setting for jeans commercial, LaToya Ruby Frazier became increasingly more activist and conjointly condemned the cynical abandon of her city by public powers and its opportunistic reconquest through the gentrification of its deserted neighborhoods. Internationally recognized today, the artist was the winner of the 2015 MacArthur Fellows Program. Last year, her residency at MAC’s gave her the opportunity, in Borinage, to pursue, through other industrial landscapes, stories of workers, and family memories, her critical inquiry on postindustrial society. The exhibition, which opens this week at MAC’s, is presenting the series And From The Coaltips A Tree Will Rise, the result of this residency, which will be discussed along with the older series dedicated to the industrial decline of her hometown (Braddock, in the Rust Belt region).

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LaToya Ruby Frazier - And from the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise

Latoya Ruby Frazier, And From The Coaltips A Tree Will Rise
Musée des Arts Contemporains (MAC’S)
February 19 through May 21, 2017
Site du Grand-Hornu
Rue Sainte-Louise, 82
B-7301 Hornu
Belgium
www.mac-s.be

Courtesy of: L’oeil De La Photographie