News Archives – Page 6 of 48 – LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier Is Paying It Forward

May 9, 2024

New York Times
by Siddhartha Mitter
Reporting from Braddock and Pittsburgh, Pa.

She may be America’s foremost social documentary photographer, now with a survey at the Museum of Modern Art. “All I’m doing is showing up as a vessel.”

The photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier creating a self-portrait in Braddock, Pa., her hometown, at the site of a footbridge over the railroad. The bridge had been torn down, but she decided to make the portrait anyway. Photo credit: Gioncarlo Valentine for The New York Times

A continuous high-pitched din — a bit whirring, a bit crunching — echoed over the Bottom, the residential sliver of Braddock, Pa., nearest to the industrial plants and the Monongahela River. It rose, indistinguishably, from the steel mill — the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, opened by Andrew Carnegie in 1875 and still operating — and the adjacent air separation plant, where gasses are piped into the mill or liquefied for shipment.

Also borne on the breeze was an unmissable acrid smell. It hung in the atmosphere on a Monday morning in April, over Washington Street. Not much was going on: Braddock, near Pittsburgh, had more than 20,000 inhabitants a century ago but now has fewer than 2,000. Still, some young people — Black, like four-fifths of the residents today — clustered around the Living Water Church, where a hearse parked outside indicated that a funeral was underway.

As I walked with the photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier — who grew up on Washington Street and made there the documentary work about her family, at once poetic and unflinching, that cemented her reputation — my nose and throat started to tingle.

“Oh yeah,” Frazier said. “The longer you’re here, the heavier it’s going to get.”

Braddock has a history of high levels of air pollution and respiratory disorders, as well as infant mortality. Pollution from the steel mill remains a public health concern: In 2022, U.S. Steel, which owns the plant, agreed to a $1.5 million fine and promised improvements in a settlement with the Environmental Protection Agency and county health authorities.

Frazier has the autoimmune disease lupus. “I shouldn’t be down here too long, because my health has been so adversely affected,” she said.

The smell thickened as we neared the factories. The gas plant occupies the site of Talbot Towers, the public housing complex where Frazier’s family lived when she was born, in 1982, and that was torn down in 1990. Across the street sits the brick husk of another church, where she attended Bible study. An inscription on its facade — “You must be born again! Of water and spirit” — has appeared in her photographs.

“It’s almost like an out-of-body experience, right?” Frazier said over the noise, as brightly painted coal tipper trucks turned into the factory gates.

“But this is what I felt and knew as a kid. I always had a feeling as a little girl that there were two realms. The physical realm — yes, we’re on Washington Street, walking toward the steel mill — but then there was the spiritual realm. That these spiritual forces were always surrounding me — just like the history.”

Frazier’s “Edgar Thomson Plant and The Bottom,” from the project “A Despoliation of Water: From the Housatonic to the Monongahela River (1930-2013).” Frazier used a helicopter to make images that conveyed the impact of industry in the landscape. via LaToya Ruby Frazier and Gladstone gallery

This weekend, Frazier’s survey exhibition, titled “Monuments of Solidarity,” opens at the Museum of Modern Art. At 42, she may be America’s foremost social documentary photographer now. Her work charts the experience of working-class people around the country as they face compounding challenges of deindustrialization, environmental degradation and inequality. Through it all, her hometown Braddock remains her best template for understanding the world.

She first made her mark with “The Notion of Family” (2001-14). It portrayed over many years her grandmother Ruby, who raised her; her step-great-grandfather, known as Gramps; and her mother, Cynthia, notably in jointly composed mother-daughter portraits. Autobiographical and interior, the work gradually opened to Braddock’s battered terrain and the local activists resisting its decline. It earned Frazier inclusion in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2015.

“Grandma Ruby and Me,” from the series “The Notion of Family,” 2005, which established Frazier as a photographer and will be part of her survey at the Museum of Modern Art. via LaToya Ruby Frazier and Gladstone gallery

After that, she widened her field. In “Flint Is Family” (2016-20), she chronicled over years how some residents of Flint, Mich., coped with the water crisis that began in 2014 when authorities switched the public supply to the polluted Flint River. It has yet to be resolved.

In 2019, she spent nine months with members of the United Auto Workers in Lordstown, Ohio, after General Motors abruptly announced the closure of its plant there. Her project, which began as a commission for The New York Times Magazine, expanded into “The Last Cruze,” an installation of photographs, video and text interviews of some 60 workers — diverse by race, gender and age — that premiered at the Renaissance Society in Chicago.

And during the pandemic, she spent weeks in Baltimore photographing Black and working-class community health workers who deployed in the city to connect a vulnerable population to medical and support services. “More Than Conquerors,” featuring dozens of these workers and in some cases their families, received the top prize in the Carnegie International exhibition in 2022.

Installation view of “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity,” at MoMA, recalls an automobile assembly line. Photo by Jonathan Dorado

Gathering these and other projects, the MoMA survey traces, for the first time in one place, Frazier’s journey toward this kind of civic polyphony. Her portraits of individuals or groups are collaboratively posed in homes, parks and workplaces. Accompanying them are extensive interviews that she conducts herself and excerpts, often at length, in her photo books and exhibition displays.

She opens space, as well, for grass-roots artists. In Flint, two poets, Amber Hasan and Shea Cobb, became her confidants and local entree. In a video Cobb, a school bus driver by day, delivers a forceful poem, then narrates Frazier’s images. In Lordstown, Kasey King, an auto worker and U.A.W. photographer, shot inside the plant — where Frazier was denied access — as the last Chevrolet Cruze moved through production. The slide show of those often emotional images, with King narrating, runs nearly one hour.

Frazier’s subject matter locates her in the engagé tradition that includes Lewis Hine, who photographed notably in Pittsburgh in the early 20th century; Dorothea Lange; Walker Evans; or one of her great inspirations, Gordon Parks. But her methods expand this canon, said Roxana Marcoci, the MoMA senior curator who organized “Monuments of Solidarity” with Caitlin Ryan, an assistant curator, and Antoinette D. Roberts, a curatorial assistant.

“Like Parks, she sees the camera lens as a radical tool for resistance,” Marcoci said. But by “centering on the act of looking after and listening to the people whom she is representing in her work,” Marcoci added, Frazier’s projects invite viewers to think alongside them, rather than regard them as subjects.

[…]

‘I come from community that’s been forgotten’

May 9, 2024

The Guardian
by Veronica Esposito

Artist and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier, one of Time’s most influential people of 2024, prepares for a major survey of her work at the MoMA

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

Momme from The Notion of Family, 2008, by LaToya Ruby Frazier. Courtesy of Gladstone gallery.

Photographer and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments of Solidarity is monumental in all senses of the word. This retrospective covering over 20 years of the artist’s output represents an opportunity for Frazier to not only show a body of work that she has devoted her creative life to, but also to show it in a way that she never thought she might be able to.

Comprised of a series of installation pieces that Frazier has declared “workers’ monuments”, this exhibit has given the photographer a rare chance to show her work on her terms – that is, to not merely show her photographs as pictures on walls, but to contextualize them via installation work that give a sense of the full networks of relationships and activism that she has built up while taking the photos. According to Frazier, it was an unexpected delight that an institution like New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) granted her the authority to do this exhibition on her terms. “This has been the most organic, harmonious working relationship,” she said. “They have let the work lead, which is really big.”

For the show, Frazier collaborated with longtime MoMA curator Roxana Marcoci, who first became acquainted with the photographer’s work during a panel in which Frazier showed a slide of a workers’ monument that she made to commemorate the United Auto Workers. From there, the collaboration evolved into a full-on survey, which was an unexpected surprise for the artist. “When they asked if I would be interested in doing an actual museum survey, it kind of blew my mind, because I’m only 42,” Frazier said. It was the kind of opportunity that artists dream of getting. “Every one of my bodies of work has been re-adapted to be a workers’ monument,” she said. “It’s the opportunity of a lifetime.”

Photo of LaToya Ruby Frazier by Sean Eaton. Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art. — LaToya Ruby Frazier. Photography by Sean Eaton. Image courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art.

Frazier has in fact received very widespread, substantial acclaim. In 2015, at age 33, she received a MacArthur Genius grant – following up on a Guggenheim the year before – she has received numerous awards for her photography, and Time magazine recently named her one of the most influential people of 2024. Frazier arranges her output among numerous “bodies of work”, the first of which was her Notion of Family, started in 2001 and formally completed 13 years later. In it, the artist forges a collaboration with her mother and grandmother, and from this nucleus she widens out her scope to record the post-industrial decline of her hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania, site of Andrew Carnegie’s first steel mill.

Frazier’s roots as a working-class daughter and granddaughter of women who lived their lives in Braddock are very much a guiding force throughout her output. She is very forward about the fact that she makes photographs of everyday Americans for everyday Americans, and she bristles at the suggestion that she be pigeonholed as a Black artist. Following The Notion of Family, subsequent bodies of work document the struggle to save Braddock’s community hospital, the water crisis in post-industrial Michigan town Flint, a collaboration on Pittsburgh’s steel industry with artist Sandra Gould Ford, who was a former employee of the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, and a chronicle of the final days of the General Motors auto plant in Lordstown, Ohio. “All the things I’m covering are all things I’ve experienced,” she told me. “I come from community that’s been forgotten. Being a little girl coming of age, looking at the impact of Reaganomics in my community, it was a very real and visceral thing for me.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Mary A. Williams Tuklor’s Mother from Flint is Family in Three Acts, 2019-20. — LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Mary A. Williams Tuklor’s Mother, Holding the Water Hose at the Atmospheric Water Generator on North Saginaw Street Between East Marengo Avenue and East Pulaski Avenue, Flint, Michigan from Flint is Family in Three Acts, 2019-20. Courtesy of Gladstone gallery.

As a photographer, Frazier seems almost compelled to blur the lines between herself and her subjects, becoming deeply involved in their lives and struggles, and those of the broader communities they represent. For instance, Frazier found herself deeply entwined in the battles waged by her subjects when she journeyed to Flint, eventually connecting with the poet and activist Shea S Cobb and her family. The project began as a five-month commission with Elle magazine, but once she arrived on the ground there, Frazier began to believe that much more time was needed to tell the story. “By the time the photo series was released, things had changed, and it didn’t feel right,” she told me. “It felt necessary to go beyond it. That’s when I realized why it’s so necessary to have artists who want to tell the story for a period of years.”

Frazier ended up not only documenting Cobb’s life in Flint but also Cobb’s “reverse migration” back to Mississippi with her daughter Zion, as well as Frazier and Cobb’s efforts to bring an atmospheric water generator back to Flint, which was still suffering from its water crisis years later. Cobb ended up using her own photos as a resource to raise money for the generator. “This is the kind of stuff that lights a fire under me,” she said, “seeing these Black women just being so resilient in the face of spatial and structural racism. It is what was keeping me engaged and wanting to keep shouldering it with them.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Grandma Ruby and Me from The Notion of Family, 2005. Courtesy of Gladstone gallery

Monuments of Solidarity makes the case for this maximalist approach to photograph, one in which the photographer is never just a documenter, but an active agent in the story being investigated. “What I’m really doing is organizing through the process of making photographs,” she said. “I help viewers see like: ‘Oh, I can take pictures and tell stories and organize in my local community on the ground.’ I don’t think people understand the fullness and potential of photographers, how you can use the power of photographs to make real institutional change.”

Frazier’s show concludes with a monument to labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, a figure whom Frazier links to Dorothea Lange, an artist who looms large over her work. Frazier places Huerta next to Lange’s iconic portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, a working-class woman whom Frazier sees are mistreated, forgotten, and robbed. “I’m creating a correction to that history,” she said. “Paying the homage and respect back to Dorothea Lange, back to Florence Owens Thompson, through what Dolores Huerta represents. It’s a beautiful, touching way to bring back a correction, a reframing of these histories and a subversion of these power dynamics. And that’s what I really want Americans to learn.”

— LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 12 May to 7 September, 2024.

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Steady Gaze

May 8, 2024

Artists and writers respond to the photographer’s arresting self-portraits

Zora J Murff, Rebecca Bengal, Zoe Leonard
May 8, 2024

An artist and activist whose work has illuminated stories of workers, women, and people of color, LaToya Ruby Frazier has devoted her career to resisting “historical erasure and historical amnesia.” To celebrate LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, a retrospective of her work that opens at MoMA on May 12, we asked artists Zoe Leonard and Zora J Murff and writer Rebecca Bengal to reflect on a single photograph chosen from the exhibition. All three photographs include self-portraits of the artist. As Leonard writes in her reflection, “The best self-portraits in art history go beyond conveying a likeness or projecting a persona. They show us a person in the world, responding to and being shaped by their circumstances at a particular moment in their life.”

Self-Portrait with Shea and Her Daughter Zion in the Bedroom Mirror, Newton, Mississippi. 2017

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Self-Portrait with Shea and Her Daughter Zion in the Bedroom Mirror, Newton, Mississippi, from the series Flint Is Family, Part II. 2017

With a photograph whose essential subject is infinity, it’s hard to know where to begin. If you weren’t familiar with the individuals depicted, you might assume that the self of the title is the woman directly in front of the bedroom mirror. But the photographed self is embedded: LaToya Ruby Frazier, also visible in the bedroom mirror, is in the background, at smaller scale, observing Shea Cobb and her daughter, Zion, as she had been for months. Well before taking this photograph, over months back in Flint, Michigan, Frazier and her camera were right with Zion and Shea in their everyday moments: doing homework after school, eating at their favorite diner, and at bedtime, avoiding the contaminated city water running through their drains, instead waterfalling bottled water onto their teeth as they brushed.

In Frazier’s photographs, power springs from the interior. This is where the matriarchal dynamics of The Notion of Family, her body of work of origin, play out: within the walls of her Grandma Ruby’s self-created refuge in Braddock, Pennsylvania. There, through the shared, complicated, and revelatory act of deep looking, she, her mother, and her grandmother built a family album, a story of resistance, a fortress against the environmental and racial injustice just outside their door.

Frazier and Shea aren’t related by blood, but this picture sees them becoming family. Born just two years apart, they are artists who became advocates and activists. They are, with Zion, summoned to Newton, Mississippi, by a photograph: In the midst of the Flint water crisis, Shea’s father, Mr. Smiley, sent her a picture of herself from her childhood, drinking water straight from a spring in the ground, back on their family farm. During their time in Newton, Shea and Zion re-root themselves in the land, Zion learning to care for Mr. Smiley’s beloved Tennessee Walking Horses. Both are living among the personal mementos and ephemera collected on Self-Portrait’s dresser: emblems of other horses, a jewelry box, a handwritten page kept in the corner of the mirror, a vignette portrait from the past, family photos tucked into other family photos.

When I say this is a photograph of infinity, I am talking about the way that in Frazier’s work, the mirror functions as a tool of framing, a means of reflection and enhanced seeing, and a portal that enlarges the world of the picture beyond its physical dimensions. Frazier isn’t the only one doing the observing here. The mirror allows her, Shea, and Zion to picture themselves and each other, simultaneously, equally, individually, and collectively.

We witness them from many surfaces too, each self reflected in the other. It’s a photograph about the power of photography to connect to the past and the ancestral, and to link to the future. Here, made visible, is the current of Frazier’s work that runs north to Flint, to autoworkers in Ohio, home to Braddock, and west to Noah Purifoy’s sculptures in the desert. It’s in Zion’s absorbing look, and it is embodied fully in Shea Cobb, the core and center of this composition. “Poetry becomes my ship of hope. And I just write as much as I can to stay free,” she said in a talk in 2022. As she stands in front of the bedroom mirror in her father’s house, her gaze is both strength-summoning and introspective. I think of a line from Shea’s poem “No Filter,” included in Frazier’s Flint Is Family, in which she speaks to the possibility of being able to drink the water of the polluted river that runs through her hometown: “What could I do, if I could taste God?”

—Rebecca Bengal

Rebecca Bengal is the author of the collection Strange Hours: Photography, Memory, and the Lives of Artists. Her writing has been published by the Oxford American, the Paris Review, Lithub, Vogue, Southern Cultures, the Believer, the Guardian, and the Criterion Collection, and she has contributed short fiction and essays to photography books by Justine Kurland, Carolyn Drake, Danny Lyon, Kristine Potter, and Paul Graham.

Huxtables, Mom and Me. 2008

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Huxtables, Mom and Me, from the series The Notion of Family. 2008

This photograph’s punctum—the subjective effect of an image—is the Huxtables. The family printed on Frazier’s T-shirt is my starting point because Denise, Theo, Vanessa, Rudy, Clair, and Cliff were also my neighbors. I was a poor kid whose single mother worked multiple jobs, and the television was my part-time caretaker, allowing me to vicariously live the Huxtables’ saccharine dream to escape my own bitter reality. The studium—the part of image-reading determined by historical and cultural experiences—is also the Huxtables. Frazier gives this away in the picture’s title and reinforces this idea in her reflection on it in her book The Notion of Family: “Between my background and my foreground I am not sure where I stand. Impacted by the Cosby effect society looked away in contempt while the Reagan administration sent its troops, cops, and K-9s to raid my home and classroom.”

These are Frazier’s incontrovertible terms for understanding her family’s real experiences against that of this fictional and idealized one, their positions within a white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, and American anti-Black violence. Rather than prioritizing our chosen punctum, she asks us to make space for her perspective, to try to find her standpoint.

To find that common ground, we must disambiguate the “Cosby effect” of 2016 and the 1980s. The former is the rise in the reporting of rapes in New York City, partially attributed to the visibility of Bill Cosby’s sexual predation. The latter—where we meet Frazier—is the effect, theorized by author Mark Anthony Neal, of the Cosby Show’s success serving “the political function of diverting attention away from the harsh realities of Reagan-era social politics.” The Huxtables’ performance of the model Black family gave rise to a flat, conservative representation of Black life. The struggle for the rest of us was real, while their elites-only uplift overshadowed the corrosive anti-Black effects of Reaganomics, union busting and labor offshoring, tough-on-crime policies, and mass incarceration.

This was class warfare and should come as no surprise given Cosby’s pop-cultural record along the color line (see his infamous “pound cake” speech). Some may conclude that Cosby’s legacy is “complicated,” given all that he did for the politics of representation for Black people (see the history of Black stunt workers in Hollywood). But attempting to determine how dirty or clean one’s slate is only serves to keep the hardest truth ungraspable. He was fulfilling white supremacy’s role for the Black bourgeoisie: to be both an aspirational model for, and an overseer and gatekeeper of, the Black proletariat.

Frazier’s request that we employ standpoint theory—and our actions, if we follow through—is the engagement of Black feminist cultural analysis vis-à-vis authors, activists, educators, scholars, and artists: Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, bell hooks, and Faith Ringgold (may she rest in power). Frazier is an interlocutor of these speculative free-thinkers: individuals who dared concern themselves with the complicated matters of Black self-determination and the omnipresent systems of domination that seek to undermine our power at all costs.

—Zora J Murff

Zora J Murff is an artist and educator living in Rhode Island. Murff’s practice is concerned with the pathology of white supremacy, the pervasiveness of anti-Blackness, and the necessity for people to develop and propagate skills in self-defense against those ills.

Self-Portrait October 7 (9:30 a.m.). 2007

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Self-Portrait October 7 (9:30 a.m.). 2007

This photograph stopped me in my tracks. It was in a group show. I don’t remember the name of the show, or the year, or the other works in the exhibition. I was walking through it, looking, and this photograph didn’t just slow me down, it brought me to a halt. This was my first encounter with LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work.

The look on her face. The set of her body. Seated, leaning ever so slightly forward with a steady gaze.

Self-portraits do something unique in art and in art history: they give us insight into how the maker saw themself, and the relation of their personhood to their art-making process. The best of them—the really great ones—go beyond conveying a likeness or projecting a persona. They show us a person in the world, responding to and being shaped by their circumstances at a particular moment in their life. I’m thinking of the late Rembrandt self-portraits: his face wistful and weary, but with a live spark in his eyes that tells us he’s not done yet. After years of performing for the camera with her lithe and glamorous body, the artist Hannah Wilke reveals a different level of grit, clarity, presence, and power in her late Intra-Venus (1991–93) photographs, which are stark and blunt in their depiction of the toll of illness and cancer treatments.

Frazier’s Self-Portrait October 7 (9:30 a.m.) depicts the photographer looking directly into the camera, and through the camera, directly at us, the viewer. Her expression communicates complexity—a sense of awareness, self-possession, thoughtfulness. Vulnerable but also resolute.

The composition of the photograph is intentional and confident. The lighting from below is watery, as though reflected from a mirror. The framing includes a stretch of empty wall, leaving ample space around the figure.

There is a certain gender ambiguity, or defiance, in her presentation—the set of her bare torso is reminiscent of a way young men are often posed, and is in contrast to conventional come-hither poses or displays of femaleness. Frazier’s bareness and beauty are part of what makes this photograph so brave. But this picture is not about the beauty of the sitter; the photograph takes hold of our gaze and focuses us in to consider this person’s internal life: their thoughts, perspective, circumstances.

More than anything, this is a portrait of a young artist. This person with their level gaze seems to have many things to say, many things to show us. To me, this photograph clearly announced the arrival of an important young voice. It acts as a wedge to cut into the canon and make space for itself. The photograph says more than “I am here.” It says “I’m ready.”

—Zoe Leonard

Zoe Leonard is an artist working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation. She lives and works in New York City and Marfa, Texas.

Courtesy of: The Museum of Modern Art

In Solidarity: A Notion of Family, A Nation of Sisters

May 3, 2024

The Museum of Modern Art
Roxana Marcoci
May 3, 2024

Excerpt from the LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity exhibition catalogue

“From the very beginning, I have always been working with other women artists who are not seen as artists or as a part of this art world,” LaToya Ruby Frazier stated in a 2019 conversation with playwright Lynn Nottage. “I am intentionally collaborating with them and then giving their work a platform. It’s my mission: advocating for other women artists. Every single body of work, I’ve done it.” ¹

Over more than two decades, Frazier has mapped a web of relations and social dynamics, reaching across generations to ensure that the lives of creative working-class women are seen and their voices are heard. For her 2024 survey exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Frazier has reconceived her distinct bodies of work as a sequence of multimedia installations that she calls “monuments for workers’ thoughts.” ²

More than merely reviving the past, her commemorations and celebrations of the ongoing labor, resilience, and creativity of working women act as a guidebook for action, a model for sisterly unity in the face of inequity and injustice.

Frazier joins a counterhegemonic chorus of artists and poets who uphold Black women’s stories of resistance and solidarity. This lineage includes the artist Kara Walker, whose 2014 public project A Subtlety—a massive, sugarcoated statue combining the traits of Sphinx and archetypal mammy—bears an extended title:

the Marvelous Sugar Baby
an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined
our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World
on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.

Walker pays tribute to the overlooked creative agency of enslaved people, which took root even within the most inhumane of labor systems. Her description of the victims of slavery as “unpaid and overworked Artisans” radically reorients the histories of American art and labor, much as Frazier’s partnership with women artists who have gone unrecognized as such implicitly revalues the artistic canon. ³

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Zion, Her Mother Shea, and Her Grandfather
Mr. Smiley Riding on Their Tennessee Walking Horses, Mares, P.T.
(P.T.’s Miss One Of A Kind), Dolly (Secretly), and Blue (Blue’s Royal
Threat), Newton, Mississippi from Flint Is Family in Three Acts. 2017–19

In a 2022 keynote address at the Museum, Frazier stated, “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.” ⁴

Growing up “in a household with a retired Black steel mill worker, my Grandma Ruby’s stepfather, who I called Gramps,” Frazier noted in a recent conversation with Marxist geographer David Harvey, “created my desire to see statues of working-class people instead of industrial capitalists.” ⁵

Rather than honoring the powerful, the artist’s alternative monuments recognize the histories, contributions, and lives of a multiracial working class from across a geographic spectrum: Braddock, Pennsylvania; Flint, Michigan; the Borinage mining region in Belgium; Lordstown, Ohio; Baltimore, Maryland; Delano, California. Moreover, the worker is not an allegorical figure: individuals, in solidarity with a larger collective, represent themselves. Open-ended, living, and relational, Frazier’s installations, through engagement with the viewer, are designed to awaken action. The artist proposes a world, in the words of Walt Whitman, “where no monuments exist to heroes but in the common words and deeds.” ⁶

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Mary A. Williams, Tuklor’s Mother, Holding
the Water Hose at the Atmospheric Water Generator on North
Saginaw Street Between East Marengo Avenue and East Pulaski
Avenue, Flint, Michigan from Flint Is Family in Three Acts. 2019–20

Speaking to Frazier of the role memory plays in radical politics, Harvey outlined a dictum from the novelist Honoré de Balzac: “Hope is a memory that desires.” Monuments—as encapsulations of memory—are not always expressions of hopeful desire, but what if they were? “The historical role of memory,” Harvey elaborated, “the historical role of what people have done in the past becomes a powerful political force when merged with contemporary desires for a better life.” ⁷

With this in mind, we might ask whether the monument as a genre, understood in new ways, could hasten the demise of structural forms of violence and oppression. Contemplating the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, DC, and other American sites of memory, scholar Sarah Lewis observes, “If we are to understand which narratives about race and citizenship are created by monuments, we need to focus on considering their temporality anew. Do they historicize events or do they signal a narrative of futurity, an order, a narrative that will define a path of civic life?” ⁸

Frazier’s installations, while preserving histories, open horizons of possibility for an antiracist future. They are oriented toward what Lewis (quoting Black feminist theorist Tina Campt) describes as that which “should be true . . . striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the present.” ⁹

Courtesy of: The Museum of Modern Art

LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Conversation,” interview by Lynn Nottage, in The Last Cruze (Chicago: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 2020), 361.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Keynote Statement,” LaToya Ruby Frazier Scholars’ Day, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 18, 2022, organized by Roxana Marcoci and Caitlin Ryan.
See Raquel Kennon, “Subtle Resistance: On Sugar and the Mammy Figure in Kara Walker’s A Subtlety and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose,” African American Review 52, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 143–64.
Frazier, “Keynote Statement.”
LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Conversation,” interview by David Harvey, in The Last Cruze, 316.
This line from Whitman’s poem “Song of the Broad-Axe” (1856–81) provides the epigraph to Natasha Trethewey’s poetry collection Monument: Poems New and Selected (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). Like Frazier, Trethewey has articulated the contemporary monument as a mode of resistance to historical erasure, its workings continuously expansive—both tangible and intangible. In this framework, a monument can be a poem or a relationship; it can be celebratory or denunciatory. Special thanks to architectural historian Amber Wiley, who first mentioned Trethewey’s work at LaToya Ruby Frazier Scholars’ Day, The Museum of Modern Art.
Harvey, in Frazier, “Conversation,” interview by David Harvey, 315.
Sarah Lewis, “A Questionnaire on Monuments,” October, no. 165 (Summer 2018): 98.
Tina Campt, Listening to Images (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 17. Quoted in Lewis, “A Questionnaire,” 93.

On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford

May 2, 2024

LaToya named in TIME’s list of 100 Most Influential People of 2024

April 18, 2024

TIME100
by Lynn Nottage

Photography by Sean Eaton. Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art.

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an eloquent storyteller, making visible the landscapes and lives of working people. With honesty and empathy, her photographs—soon to be displayed in a solo show at New York City’s MOMA—force us to confront how disenfranchisement, corporate greed, and government neglect have impacted the lives of people from the auto factories in the Rust Belt to the toxic waterways of Flint, Mich. She is an archivist, a healer, and an artist. Her work captures the anxiety, the beauty, and the reality of people negotiating the complexities of life on the brink. The resulting photo essays are informed by collaboration with their participants, creating searing portraits that reflect care and intimacy. LaToya’s images pierce our complacency and demand that we pay attention to the world around us with intention and compassion.
Lynn Nottage is a two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright