Frazier awarded MacArthur fellowship

LaToya Ruby Frazier is the only photographer among the 24 winners of the prestigious 2015 MacArthur Fellow Program by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

“I’m overjoyed to receive this award because often, when you’re a young black woman talking about inequality, people don’t take you seriously,” [Frazier] says. “It’s validation to my work being a testimony and a fight for social justice and cultural change.”

Informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, Frazier explores identities of place, race, and family in work that is a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative. The crumbling landscape of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving steel town, forms the backdrop of her images, which make manifest both the environmental and infrastructural decay caused by postindustrial decline and the lives of those who continue—largely by necessity—to live amongst it.

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Courtesy of Rachel Lowry @rachelllowry of TIME’s LightBox and MacFound.org

LaToya receives ICP Infinity Award

LRF-Notion_Of_Family-bookThe International Center of Photography (ICP) is pleased to announce the honorees of the 2015 Infinity Awards including Guggenheim Fellow LaToya Ruby Frazier for her publication The Notion Of Family. Award winners will be honored at the gala event on Thursday, April 30, 2015, at Pier Sixty, Chelsea Piers, in New York City.

The Infinity Awards are widely respected as the leading honor for excellence in photography. The awards are also ICP’s largest annual fundraiser and support all of ICP’s programs, including exhibitions, education, collections, and community outreach. Since 1985, the annual ICP Infinity Awards have recognized major contributions and emerging talent in the field.

Read more about ICP’s Infinity Awards…

Available at Amazon.com

LaToya Ruby Frazier named 2015 TED Fellow

LaToya Ruby FrazierLaToya Ruby Frazier has been named a 2015 TED Fellow and will speak at the TED2015 conference Truth and Dare, held March 16-20 in Vancouver.

The new class of Fellows for TED2015 includes 21 game-changing thinkers representing 15 countries, working across disciplines at the forefront of their fields.

Read more about the 2015 TED Fellows -»

Frazier named Skowhegan resident faculty

Skowhegan announces 2015 faculty, including LaToya Ruby Frazier.

Frazier(born 1982, Braddock, Pennsylvania) received her BFA in applied media arts from Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (2004) and her MFA in art photography from Syracuse University (2007). She also studied under the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program (2010–2011) and was the Guna S. Mundheim Fellow for visual arts at the American Academy in Berlin (2013–2014).

In 2014, Frazier accepted the assistant professor of photography position at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has previously held academic and curatorial positions at Yale University School of Art, Rutgers University, and Syracuse University. Frazier lectures prolifically at academic and cultural institutions such as International Center of Photography, NY; Columbia University School of the Arts, NY; Parsons, New School, NY; Pratt Institute, NY; Cooper Union, NY; Tisch School of Arts, New York University; School of Visual Arts, NY; Freie Universitat Berlin, Dahlem Humanities Center and Hamburger Bahnhof; and Tate Modern, London among others.

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Courtesy of SkowheganArt.org

Frazier awarded Guggenheim Fellowship

Bunn Family Home

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation has awarded LaToya Ruby Frazier a Fellowship based on prior achievement and exceptional promise. Successful candidates were chosen from a group of almost 3,000 applicants.

LaToya Ruby Frazier has been described as “an artist on a mission with a prophetic voice” who has a “preternaturally mature body of work,” by The Village Voice and New York Times.

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Village Voice Review

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Tenant Farm for the 21st Century

Self Portrait (March 10a.m.) 2009

Self Portrait (March 10a.m.) 2009 ©LaToya Ruby Frazier

The Village Voice
By Christian Viveros-Faune
Apr 3, 2013

The mother of all Great Depression books, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, grew out of a Time magazine assignment. Accepting it were two young artistes, James Agee and Walker Evans, who agreed to produce a “photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers.” Their boss, Henry Luce, wanted a tidy piece of objective journalism; what he got was a 495-page tome that blew away traditional forms of photographic and written reportage. It was also, in Agee’s beatific parlance, “an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.”