LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity

Brooklyn Rail
by Kamora Monroe

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an enigma, but her subjects are definitely not.

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s installation The Last Cruze, 2019, at The Museum of Modern Art

Installation view: LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2024. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.


A comprehensive exhibition of Frazier’s work over the years, titled Monuments of Solidarity, is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art. Comprehensive is almost an understatement; this exhibition covers over one hundred pieces across seven bodies of work from 2003 to 2024. No stranger to MoMA, Frazier has been in two previous exhibitions there—as well as many other group and solo shows throughout the world.

There is a free-flowing quality to the exhibition as each gallery smoothly transitions to the next. Even so, each room has a unique lighting, color, and setup that evoke different emotions. The first gallery I saw, subtitled “The Last Cruze,” consisted of bright red headboard-like structures towering single-file in front me, in a formation like that of a train track. Trains and beds are often things one can sleep on, but—in this exhibition—I found my eyes peeled for each lengthy story I had to trudge through. Each structure displayed a union worker’s photo and their story. The room itself was a grayish blue all over. The straight line of fluorescents above cascaded down on the red structures, the rest of the room dimly lit and adopting an eerie quality instead, which wasn’t helped by the closeness of the red structures. A small, beige room draped in a yellowish fluorescent lighting, which held the project titled More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021–22 (2022), evoked a feeling of sterility. The room contained the stories of community health workers, with their images and stories placed on moving structures that looked like hospital monitors. My eyes traced the bottom of the structures—falling upon the sight of unlocked wheels. I flirted with the idea of moving these monitors, perhaps toying with the chronology and its impact, but this desire quickly faded—the sterile lighting negated my buoyant thoughts. Next, I passed into a room with a rounded shape, entrapping itself with walls lined with collected paperwork, cyanotypes, and color photographs demanding the viewer’s full attention. With abrupt lighting changes, I was intoxicated by its constant conceptual motion. Then, I found calm. The final galleries were more underwhelming in their layout, composed of neutral-toned walls and standard museum lighting, which was almost a saddening sight. However, everything was quickly redeemed by the content in such a small space. It was as though you could fit all the pieces in a small loft. Kind of tight but not jarring or overly fussy.

Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, MoMA

Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2024. Photo: Jonathan Dorado.


As I made my way back into the blue-gray room with the beaming fluorescent lights, it was almost ironic how the largest image in the room was the easiest to miss. As my head swiveled, almost falling off of my neck in doing so—my feet led me left. Through a slew of people, I was sucked into a 2019 photo of Marilyn Moore from Frazier’s The Last Cruze installation, bound on the wall. Immediately, my eyes were drawn to the hands. This photo was duplicated at both ends of the gallery, and it was as though I could hear its call in both my ears at once. Hands crossed, left over right—experiences crash into one another, yet remain calm: a testament to perseverance. The subject looks relaxed—almost slouching in her seat. It’s not in a way that denotes bad posture, but rather comfort, that it would be painful to sit differently. The photo is extremely sharp, allowing the viewer to see each detail, down to the wrinkles, ridges in the nails, and each divot in her rings. The image evokes a kind of nostalgic and sentimental quality: nostalgic because these hands remind me of my grandma’s, carefully smoothing and twisting my hair as a child; sentimental because the wrinkles denote experience in life. I imagine the rings on Marilyn Moore’s fingers on a stack, like my grandmothers—and her lightweight jacket coming from the front closet nearest to the door. I imagine she never forgets to put the chain on the door. I imagine the wooden table that those hands rest on smells of Old English wood cleaner. This image plays on portraiture, yet redefines it in that it de-emphasizes the need for faces, and places emphasis on an entirely new part of the subject. I got the spitting image of my grandmother without even seeing Moore’s face.

Photo of hands

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Marilyn Moore, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee and Retiree Executive Board, (Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co., Lear Seating Corp., 32 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, Assembly Plant, Van Plant, Metal Fab, Trim Shop), with her General Motors retirement gold ring on her index finger, Youngstown, OH from The Last Cruze, 2019. © 2023 LaToya Ruby Frazier, courtesy the artist and Gladstone gallery.


These may be Frazier’s Monuments of Solidarity, but I argue they are also the opposite, in that she works to retain an intimate bond between the viewer and the subject by making their story part of the work itself. In some ways, this factor turns its head away from the monumentality of the exhibition, in that the texts do not allow room for the photos and their subjects to speak for themselves. The necessity of reading in conjunction with viewing the photo takes away from having a natural experience and mental conversation with the subjects. I came out of the exhibit more knowledgeable on people’s stories and lives in different times of hardship, but at times the influx of information obscured the experience of viewing the photograph, especially as the works approached more recent years. I would have liked to converse telepathically with the subjects and perhaps see their stories, as opposed to reading them in large blocks of text shifted to the right side. However intimacy is never the enemy, I find—and I believe that these stories are necessary to platform, by any means. The importance of a viewer’s ability to more easily resonate with the subjects of the photo is underscored in Moments of Solidarity, as Frazier ensures that she platforms commonly unfamiliar faces in art spaces. Although, for me—her subjects aren’t so unfamiliar.

Read more…

Courtesy of: Brooklyn Rail

Breath(e): Toward and Climate and Social Justice

Flaunt Magazine
by Julia Zara

Time is of the Essence in this PST ART Initiative at the Hammer Museum

We measure everything in time—the hours left in a flight, the minutes remaining for our pasta to boil, the seconds until a workout is over—with eyes glued to the timer. As time dwindles down and our anxious waiting is either gratified or exacerbated by the release of the bells, it’s only a matter of nanoseconds until we grasp the clock yet again, setting another timer for the next task, the next deadline, the next cutoff. We wait, we time, and we move on.

However, there exists a certain group of time watchers who don’t move on. Climate activists from Elizabeth Wanjiru Wathuti to Greta Thunberg remind the world that time is crucial and of the essence in the race against climate change. And plastered above New York City’s Union Square is a blaring red reminder that time, as we know it, is running thin: in fact, as this post goes live, the Climate Clock reads that there’s four years and 343 days until climate change becomes irreversible.

Breath(e): Toward and Climate and Social Justice—a group exhibition at the Hammer Museum presented with Conservation International, a global nonprofit dedicated to sustainability—is one such diligent observer of time and the elements. Showcasing artists using environmental art practices to address the climate crisis and anthropogenic disasters, Breath(e) taps into the intertwined relationship between equity and social justice. As a participating exhibition in the Getty Museum’s region-wide PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative—which will see collaboration between 818 artists and 50 exhibitions in Southern California—Breath(e) displays over 100 artworks by 25 international artists alone.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Zion Taking Her First Sip of Water from the Atmospheric Water Generator with Her Mother Shea Cobb on North Saginaw Street between East Marengo Avenue and East Pulaski Avenue, Flint, Michigan, 2019. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle FineArt Baryta. 30 × 40 in. (76.2 × 101.6 cm). © LaToya Ruby Frazier; Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.

Curated by artist Glenn Kaino and guest curator Mika Yoshitake, Breath(e) will take over the Hammer Museum like breath itself, blowing life into the fight against climate change and reigniting the cause through art. Featuring commissioned works by artists Mel Chin, Ron Finley, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Garnett Puett, and Lan Tuazon, the multidisciplinary exhibition advocates for a nonhierarchical perspective on climate change that’s influenced by ancestral indigenous knowledge—where natural materials are a rudimentary family, not mere receptacles for human consumption. Commissioned pieces, including full-scale garden installations and bee-degraded sculptures, will be presented alongside uncommissioned works such as Mika Tajima’s New Humans II, a piece that uses machine learning to activate an undulating pool of black magnetic liquid, and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Flint is Family, a photo series that depicts the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

Even so, there’s still time to see the exhibition. Breath(e) will be on view at the Hammer Museum from September 14, 2024 to January 5, 2025.

Read more…

Courtesy of: Flaunt Magazine

BMA to present ‘More Than Conquerors’

Baltimore Fishbowl
by Ed Gunts

Baltimore’s Community Health Workers are the subject of an art installation that the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) will present starting in November, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s installation entitled More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022. 

LaToya Ruby Frazier. More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022. 2022. Installation view: LaToya Ruby Frazier, Gladstone Gallery, New York, March 2 – April 15, 2023. Commissioned by Carnegie Museum of Art for the 58th Carnegie International and funded in part by National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship, 2021-22. © LaToya Ruby Frazier, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.


Featuring a series of portraits and related narratives mounted on stainless-steel IV poles, the installation documents and celebrates the essential work performed by Baltimore’s Community Health Workers during the rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Frazier’s work was commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art for the 58th Carnegie International in 2022 in Pittsburgh, where it was installed and won the Carnegie Prize.  The Carnegie International is North America’s longest-running international art show. Funded in part by a National Geographic Storytelling Fellowship, More than Conquerors was shown at the Gladstone Gallery in New York from March 2 to April 15, 2023. It is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through September 7.

The BMA acquired the work in the spring of 2023, with support from the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland, and will show it from November 3, 2024 to March 23, 2025. The Baltimore installation marks the first time that it will be on view at the museum and in the city that inspired it.

[…]

Read more…

Courtesy of: Baltimore Fishbowl

In Photos of Flint and of Health Care Workers, LaToya Ruby Frazier Updates American Iconography

Art In America
by Shameekia Shantel Johnson

Since the early 2000s, Frazier has enlisted photography to transform everyday people and community organizers into statuesque figures.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Momme from The Notion of Family, 2008

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Momme, 2008


There’s nothing more American than the idioms capturing the pride of hard work and individuality, the “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” and “burning the midnight oil” slogans that drape us in the archetype of the solo pioneer. Our country’s ethos often feels like a byproduct of the ad-man age, teeming with nostalgia for a time when everything was American-made, when labor was synonymous with working-class pride rather than exploitation. In “Monuments of Solidarity,” LaToya Ruby Frazier’s first museum survey, on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through September 7, we see the artist fashion new grammars of American identity, ones that are being formulated now, in the postindustrial boom.

Since the early 2000s, Frazier has enlisted photography to transform everyday people and community organizers into statuesque figures. Her tender portraits evoke a dedication to world-building that centers around a love ethic. Most importantly, seeing Frazier’s expansive artworks in the near collapse of an empire calls attention to the fallacies of American hubris: that our country may never tremble, or more arrogantly put, that a single leader might keep us afloat.

It’s bittersweet to acknowledge that the best art comes from moments of indelible pain. That is how we are introduced to Frazier’s work: at the start of the exhibition, we meet a teenage Frazier who trains the camera on herself, and on the matriarchs in her family. She orients our gaze towards three generations of women all experiencing the repercussions of poverty and ecological contamination in the industrial town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. Images and videos from her illustrious series, “The Notion of Family”—which she worked on for more than a decade between 2001 and 2014—are suspended in the air or glittered along the lavender walls that frame the predictable gentleness of feminine youth against the harsh realities of social, economic, and environmental dispositions. The black-and-white gelatin silver prints are presented on a modest scale that strikes the perfect balance between intimacy and immediacy. In Momme (2008), a petite double portrait of Frazier and her mother, Cynthia, their faces eclipse one another, aligning in such a way that they appear as one person. Self Portrait (United States Steel), 2010, pairs a color video diptych of Frazier nude from the waist up with reels of smoke from a Braddock factory looming in the air. Here, we witness the symbiotic relationship between her vulnerable body and our sickly landscape, both suffering from the chemical ills of capitalism. “The Notion of Family” is grounded in metaphors of decay, mirrors, and lineage, weaving autobiography with public investigation, a combination that remains consistent throughout her practice.

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s installation The Last Cruze, 2019, at The Museum of Modern Art

View of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s installation The Last Cruze, 2019, at The Museum of Modern Art.
Photo Jonathan Dorado/Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York


Seeing Frazier’s magnum opus of a series unfold throughout these first galleries helps solidify the importance of her legacy right away. It’s always a pleasure revisiting the catalyst that bore the beloved artist-activist, as it is an honor to glide throughout the exhibition and see how her work grew more refined in the series that follow.

[…]

Read more…

Courtesy of: Art in America

LaToya Ruby Frazier on Lee Friedlander’s Ohio Factory Valley Series

“I can speak through photographs about how I feel about my lived experience in America and pay homage to people who are also everyday working people.”

A photographer finds “healing” in the representation of Black working-class histories.

Photographer and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier sees the legacy of the Black women of America’s working class in Lee Friedlander’s “Ohio Factory Valley” series. Through her personal memories and close observation, these lesser-known photographs become “knockouts” that empower the women they depict.. On the occasion of her timely exhibition “Monuments of Solidarity” at MoMA, Frazier traces the trajectory of documentary photography, from these two inspiring photographs to her approach of collaborative “visual healing.”


In the online edition of MoMA’s ArtSpeaks program, we invite staff members, artists, and special guests to share personal impressions of an artwork in the collection. Here, photographer and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s impassioned reflection centers on Lee Friedlander’s Ohio Factory Valley series, which highlights the legacy and contributions of Black working women in America’s Rust Belt. For Frazier, these images, which document these women’s longstanding role in the US workforce, provide “visual healing.” She invites us to explore the thoughtfulness of Friedlander’s photographs, where we find traces of influence on Frazier’s own practice and her approach to photography as a visual storytelling and social-justice device.

Courtesy of: The Museum of Modern Art

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments to Workers

by Lovia Gyarkye
Hammer & Hope

The artist works with her collaborators to try to “invert and redistribute wealth and power.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier headshot by Eric Hart Jr. for Hammer & Hope
LaToya Ruby Frazier at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, June 20, 2024. Photograph by Eric Hart Jr. for Hammer & Hope.

On a cool evening in May, LaToya Ruby Frazier gathered with friends and strangers in a basement theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The communion was a public event tied to the artist’s new exhibition, Monuments of Solidarity, surveying more than two decades of photographic work. After a brief introduction by the curator Roxana Marcoci, Frazier walked over to a podium at the front of the room. She wore a blue silk suit, and her hair, a dark brown mass with sandy highlights, was styled into an afro. The artist looked like a figure pulled straight from Barkley L. Hendricks’s ethereal portraits.

“I’ve used my camera as a compass to direct a pathway toward the illuminated truth of the indomitable spirit of working-class families and communities in the 21st century,” Frazier said, reading from a recent essay. “For this reason, 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.”

This essay, which is printed in full at the beginning of the exhibition catalog, defined the center of the evening’s program, “A Credo on Solidarity,” which included a suite of creative responses to Frazier’s philosophy from other artists and scholars. The poets Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan performed spoken word, reading a long poem from a large brown scroll they unfurled onstage. Sandra Gould Ford, an artist, educator, and former steelworker, presented a slideshow illustrating Frazier’s thesis with photos, quotes and videos. There was sound art, featuring June Jordan’s 1982 poem “Moving Towards Home,” by Shala Miller; a biographical essay by the scholar Imani Perry; and an affecting dance by the video and performance artist Liz Magic Laser and her mother, the choreographer and dancer Wendy Osserman.

These pieces not only embodied the ideas in Frazier’s credo — subjectivity, power, art as a means of healing — they also testified to a critical component of the artist’s work. At the heart of Monuments of Solidarity is the artist’s devotion to collaboration. Frazier was raised Baptist, and her faith is a clarifying tool for understanding her practice. She believes in empathetic listening and frequently cites agape love — a Christian idea that promotes selfless and unconditional care for others — as a principal tenet. Like James Baldwin, whom the artist counts among her influences, Frazier positions herself as an interlocutor, someone “called to stand in the gap between the working class and creative class communities.”

Several of the participants in “A Credo on Solidarity” had made images with her before. Frazier met Cobb and Hasan while working on Flint Is Family in Three Acts (2016–20), a study of the government-made water crisis in the beleaguered Michigan city. She and Ford collaborated on the series On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford (2017), which featured Frazier’s photographs alongside Ford’s images to tell the story of labor conditions in a steel manufacturing company in Pittsburgh, Pa. By forging enduring alliances with her subjects — collaborating on art projects, designing a profit-sharing model that funnels resources back into the community, and giving people in the photographs final say on any accompanying text — the artist has upended the conventional dynamics of documentary photography. Her images are historical correctives that dignify working-class communities previously denied such recognition.

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s installation The Last Cruze, 2019, at The Museum of Modern Art

Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado/MoMA.


“It’s always been a dream of mine to have a museum of workers’ thoughts,” Frazier, 42, told me two weeks before her communion of collaborators at MoMA. “What would it look like if there were monuments erected for workers and their families and their descendants instead of industrial capitalists?” We were sitting in a nondescript room in the museum, surrounded by tokens of a muted office life — dusty windows, an empty desk — and signed copies of Frazier’s exhibition catalog. In just a few days, her sprawling exploration of workers past, present, and future would open to the public.

Monuments of Solidarity, on view through Sept. 7, comes at an energizing time for the U.S. labor movement. From UPS drivers to Hollywood writers and actors, workers have won big contracts that guarantee higher wages, better health insurance, and stronger job protections. Even though union density remains stubbornly low, a majority of Americans support unions and more than half a million employees participated in hundreds of strikes across the country in 2023. Frazier’s show meets the demands of this moment by sharing the lessons of recent labor rights actions and presenting a record of contemporary civic engagement more generally. From chronicling how the local United Auto Workers union in Lordstown, Ohio, protected employees impacted by the General Motors plant closure to showing Flint residents using innovative technology to procure clean water for themselves, Frazier’s images affirm how crucial collaboration and information exchange among the working class is to liberation work. “I’m concerned with getting the general public more knowledge about certain laws and policies that are impacting our basic human rights,” Frazier said. “We don’t have time to wait on our elected officials or mass media to tell the right stories or the full truth.” Viewers are encouraged not only to identify with other workers but also to connect the dots of their oppression and, eventually, enact change in their own communities.

Across the exhibition’s eight rooms, Frazier has erected monuments composed of photographs, extensive first-person testimonies, video projections, and audio pieces that detail how people in the United States survive government negligence and corporate greed. They span the length of her career, from the deeply intimate images of her mother and grandmother to her homage to the labor activist Dolores Huerta. The artist choreographs objects in each room, arranging the images, text, and video and sculptural and architectural installations to encourage different kinds of meditation. “The way she has rethought both conceptual and documentary art practices to create what is truly an artistic activist practice is what attracted me to her,” Marcoci said of Frazier and her work. To the curator, this exhibition is “not about representing people exclusively through [Frazier’s] lens, but through their own testimony.”

[…]

Read more…

Courtesy of: Hammer & Hope

©2006– LaToya Ruby Frazier. All Rights Reserved.
No images may be copied or saved without express written permission from the artist.
error: No content or images may be copied or saved without express written permission from the artist.