News Archives – Page 6 of 48 – LaToya Ruby Frazier

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

Photo of LaToya Ruby Frazier by Sean Eaton. Courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art.

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

FAMILY TIES

March 28, 2024

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s intimate, intergenerational portraits

The Atlantic
by Hannah Giorgis

The steel industry was already collapsing by the time the photographer and visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier was born, in 1982. Like many Rust Belt communities, her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, has suffered both economic and environmental distress: Thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished, but chemicals from the steel plants still pollute Braddock’s skies.

In The Notion of Family, a series she began as a teenager in 2001 and continued to work on for more than a decade, Frazier examines the physical and psychic toll wrought by industrial decay. The series presents more than simple snapshots of devastation. The Notion of Family is an intimate, intergenerational exploration of the care that Black women show one another as corporations and public safety nets falter. It is also intensely personal: Frazier photographed herself alongside her mother and grandmother, who helped guide her creative decisions. We see a young Frazier sitting on the living-room floor with her grandmother, surrounded by dolls and statuettes. In another photo, Frazier gazes into the mirror while her mother applies a chemical relaxer to her hair.

The images are some of her earliest works on view this spring in “Monuments of Solidarity,” the first major-museum survey of Frazier’s career, at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. In a body of work that now spans multiple decades, Frazier has continued bearing witness to postindustrial landscapes—and the people left navigating them. Her aim, she has written, is to resist, through everything she creates, the forces of “historical erasure and historical amnesia.”

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LaToya Ruby Frazier Raises Her Lens Against Environmental Racism and Healthcare Inequity in America

August 25, 2023

Arts Help
by Zarah Owais

From Braddock, Pennsylvania, photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier uses her lens to capture the true essence of the Black experience in America. Her work tells the story of struggle but also that of resilience and strength as she exposes the cracks in the American water sanitation and health care system that marginalized populations fall through all too often.

Her photo essays Flint is Family, The Notion of Family, Campaign for Braddock Hospital and The Grey Area touch on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals for Clean Water and Sanitation and Industries, Innovation, and Infrastructure. Undoubtedly, consistently depriving specific groups of access to healthcare, water, and fundamental human necessities can unquestionably be considered as a form of violence. By advocating for equitable and accessible healthcare for the Black community, Frazier’s work also aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development goal of Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.

From Flint is Family, 2016. Image courtesy of Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane. — From *Flint is Family,* 2016. Image courtesy of Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane.

In her 2019 Ted Talk Frazier describes the story behind Flint is Family while dissecting environmental racism and healthcare inequity. Recounting her experience visiting a public school in the area she says, “It rocked me to the core to see that in America, we can go from fountains that say ‘Whites’ or ‘Blacks only,’ to today seeing fountains that say, “Contaminated water. Do not drink.” And somehow, that’s acceptable?”

The history of environmentalism in the United States has been deeply embedded with racism since its beginnings. The all too predictable patterns of history come to light once again when looking at the Flint water crisis of 2014. It is a repeated failure of institutions to implement the necessary infrastructure to support marginalized groups thereby pushing these people deeper to the margins of society. The social, political, and historical cannot be separated from the empirical evidence.

The mishandling of the Flint water crisis despite outbreaks of disease, lead poisoning and numerous complaints by the community’s citizens demanding the city’s attention, should come as no surprise at all. Against this backdrop, and drawing parallels to her experience growing up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier’s work – particularly Flint is Family, Campaign for Braddock Hospital, and The Grey Area – confronts environmental racism and healthcare inequity in the United States.

[…]

From *The Notion of Family,* 2001-2014. Image courtesy of The New York Times.

Another photo essay, photographed between 2001 and 2014, The Notion of Family looks at the Black experience in the face of the American healthcare system. In this project, Frazier shares her personal experience growing up in Braddock, Pennsylvania and her experience as a victim of the unjust healthcare system. Battling cancer, as did her mother and grandmother, Frazier was exposed to a healthcare system deeply embedded with racism.

A Ted Talk by Dorothy Roberts describes the problem of race-based medicine where race in biomedicine is used as a proxy for underlying features that are present in certain social categories of people, but are not themselves racial. As in, socioeconomic factors such as healthcare inequity, water crisis, etc., that shape the health of marginalized groups are ignored and reframed as matters of race, something biologically constituted to these groups.

As a result, victims of an unjust system are conveniently blamed for their inadequate health while the institutions entrenched in discriminatory values perpetrating injustice reign freely. Frazier’s work urges institutions to take accountability for their histories of injustice towards marginalized populations and take initiative to, “promote and enforce non-discriminatory laws and policies for sustainable development.”

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