“Politics & Poetics”
“LaToya Ruby Frazier: Politics & Poetics”
Featured on NJTV’s “State of the Arts”
Aired: Sunday, April 1, 2012 at 8 pm on NJTV.
LaToya Ruby Frazier at the Whitney Biennial
Self Portrait (March 10 a.m.) 2009 ©LaToya Ruby Frazier
NJ Today
By Susan Wallner
A hot young artist making waves at the current Whitney Biennial, LaToya Ruby Frazier has a laser focus and a committed work ethic. She commutes daily to her job at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers in New Brunswick, where she curates the gallery and teaches photography. She shows her work internationally, with exhibitions in Italy, Korea, and Spain in 2011 alone. The artist, born in 1982, creates evocative yet hard-hitting work about her family and the place where she grew up – the decaying steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside of Pittsburgh.
Susan Wallner is an award-winning producer with PCK Media. She is a long-time contributor to State of the Arts, now airing on NJTV Sundays at 8 pm.
“Inheritance” at iMOCA
Inheritance
LaToya Ruby Frazier and Tony Buba
April 6 — May 19
Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art
“iMOCA will celebrate ten years by bringing in artist LaToya Ruby Frazier to curate the most comprehensive display of her work, some of it never seen before, for her exhibit, Inheritance.”
Whitney Museum artist profile
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs cover three bodies of work that revolve around her hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania. The working-class suburb of Pittsburgh thrived in the first half of the twentieth century as home to a large Andrew Carnegie–owned steel mill. With the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970s, however, Braddock entered a long and ongoing period of economic crisis. The Notion Of Family (2002– ), perhaps Frazier’s best-known work to date, is an ongoing series of searing black-and-white photographs documenting the artist’s family, one of the many that has borne the brunt of the town’s social, economic, and environmental decline.
Courtesy of: Whitney Museum of Art, 2012 Biennial
When the Personal Turns Political
When the Personal Turns Political: LaToya Ruby Frazier at the Whitney Biennial
"Grandma Ruby and U.P.M.C.," 2011. From the series "Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital)."
Time Magazine
Lightbox
Paul Moakley
February 29, 2012
From the outset of her career as a young artist, LaToya Ruby Frazier has always found inspiration at home. In thoughtfully constructed black and white photographs she began, in her teens, to document herself and her family life in Braddock, Pa.
“What’s the most intimate thing you can portray? For me, it’s myself,” she says.
The work Frazier has featured in the 2012 Whitney Biennial in New York City, which starts Thursday, builds on the classic documentary work she studied while in college at Syracuse University. Over time, the photographer, now 30, began to incorporate staged narratives and self-portraiture meant to challenge viewers with questions about the artist’s objectivity and representation, and that of her loved ones.
NYT – Nerves of Steel
LaToya featured in Timely – The New York Times Style Magazine.
“Jenny Holzer’s Truism,” from the portfolio “Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital),” 2011.
“If the individuals and families most affected during the Great Depression had photographed themselves instead of being shot by government-commissioned photographers,” asks the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, “what would their own self-representation look like?”
More: NYTimes.com
