The New York Times Style Magazine
by Zoë Lescaze

A marriage of art and activism, the artist’s searing photographs reveal the human toll of economic injustice.

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When General Motors announced plans to slash its domestic work force in 2018, company stock soared 5 percent. LaToya Ruby Frazier, a Chicago-based artist whose photographs and videos champion unsung members of the working class, was furious. She decided to embark upon a new series devoted to the autoworkers who were contending with the possible loss of their plant in Lordstown, Ohio; they would be the subject of an upcoming exhibition and a published photo essay. But before any of that could happen, the workers had to agree to let her into their lives. Frazier traveled to their union hall and sat in the foyer as the members filed in for a big meeting that would begin with a vote on her. She was both astonished by their diversity — they were young and old, Black and white, male and female — and aware that she wasn’t necessarily welcome. “As a Black woman, I know what it feels like when someone’s eyes rest on me in a hostile way,” she said. “And I think they have a right to do that. … You’re being told awful news that is going to destroy your livelihood, your income, your family, your community. These people were not in a good mood when I got there.” The doors closed and Frazier waited, heart pounding, while Local 1112 of the United Auto Workers union decided whether to grant her unprecedented access.

The vote was a unanimous yes. The doors opened and Frazier strode inside with four cameras slung across her chest and shoulders. She immediately dropped to the floor and began crawling around the perimeter of the hall, capturing the expressions of anguish, confusion and disbelief written on the faces of people whose lives were falling apart.

“I am showing these dark things about America because I love my country and countrymen,” she said. “When you love somebody, you tell them the truth. Even if it hurts.”

Frazier’s radical empathy has brought her to places whose occupants have every reason to distrust outsiders. She photographs communities gutted by unemployment, poverty, racism and environmental degradation, seeking out subjects dehumanized or ignored by the mainstream media. At 39, she sees her life’s work as an archive of humanity, one that particularly documents the courage and diversity of blue-collar workers and the consequences of the policies that condemn them to struggle. For her, this is what it means to be a patriot. “I am showing these dark things about America because I love my country and countrymen,” she said. “When you love somebody, you tell them the truth. Even if it hurts.”

Socially conscious artistic practices may be in vogue these days, but Frazier goes beyond hollow claims of “raising awareness” with an essay in a magazine or a show at an art museum. She is the rare photographer who approaches relationships with her subjects as lifelong commitments, and who tries to make substantial, material differences in their lives. Frazier’s conviction in art that involves — and transforms — entire communities aligns her with Rick Lowe, an artist who, with his collaborators, famously converted an underserved swath of Houston into a nexus for housing, art programming and neighborhood development activities. She also carries on the legacy of the German artist Joseph Beuys, who believed that participatory art could heal society. Frazier, though, pursues these conceptual ideals while still producing formally elegant images using traditional techniques. Working mainly with a medium-format camera and black-and-white film, her intimate domestic portraits and expressive landscapes are classically beautiful, even when they depict harrowing realities. Making photographs as poetic as they are political is, for Frazier, a way of honoring her subjects. “She doesn’t pop in and pop out,” said the artist Carrie Mae Weems, Frazier’s friend and early mentor. “These are long-term projects that deeply matter, not only to her but to the community and, ultimately, I think, to the nation.”

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This fall, Frazier will publish “Flint Is Family in Three Acts,” a record of her five-year collaboration with people affected by the ongoing contaminated-water crisis in Flint, Mich. “The Last Cruze,” a formidable and moving volume of portraits and interviews with the autoworkers, was released in December. “If you take the work seriously, it changes how you see people,” said the artist Doug DuBois, another friend and mentor, who taught Frazier at Syracuse University. Her work has the power to propel viewers “from empathy to activism,” he said. “If you get it, you’re going to get angry.”

Frazier herself is fierce, prone to eloquent, impromptu diatribes on oppression in its many forms, from Reaganomics to redlining. She wears gold-rimmed glasses and her hair in an Afro, a look she describes as “militant nerd.” And she’s funny — quick to find the dark humor in bleak situations. A few years ago, when a doctor told her that lupus, an incurable autoimmune disease, had rendered her skin photosensitive to the point where she can’t safely go outside on sunny days or even sit under fluorescent lights, she couldn’t help but laugh. “So I’ve become one with my medium?” she asked, her raspy voice incredulous. “I’m cracking up. He doesn’t think it’s funny, but it’s like, how ironic.”

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Courtesy of: The New York Times Style Magazine

New Museum
Art Review
by Jerry Saltz

The New Museum’s show “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” finds terrible beauty in the pain, rage, mania, and sorrow that form the continuing psychosis of this country’s obsession with race.

Featuring 37 Black artists working in the United States from 1964 to today, it plumbs the long American night of racism with an eye on the poetics of abstraction, the possibilities of monochrome, and the documentation of bare facts. Together, these 97 pieces suggest Black artists have made the most important art of our time.

It’s notable that this exhibition, with its themes of mourning and loss, was the last organized by the great Nigerian-born, Germany-based curator Okwui Enwezor, a visionary pioneer of international multiculturalism, who died of cancer in 2019 at the age of 55. Part of the big global art world that self-started in the early ’90s, Enwezor’s animating purpose as a curator seemed to be to declare a war on the apartheid within the institutional art world, which simply left artists from Africa out of exhibitions. Above all other curators of his generation, Enwezor brought contemporary African art and history to bear on the whole world, and he was unabashed about wanting power so that he could effect change. The show was incomplete at his death and has ably been brought to fruition using notes from and conversations with Enwezor by curators Naomi Beckwith and Massimiliano Gioni, artist Glenn Ligon, and independent curator-writer Mark Nash.

Enwezor’s curatorial eye centered on an erotics of form, color, and structure; even the most difficult or didactic work in this show is packed with its own intellectual and visual pleasure. Unlike with similar exhibitions, you will not spend your time laboring over gassy wall texts. The U.S.-based artists Enwezor worked with are now well known, and that can make this show feel a little orthodox and official in its selections — until you remember, of course, that he helped bring many of these people to light. There are important artists Enwezor has previously highlighted not included here, including David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Wangechi Mutu, and Gary Simmons; he may not have thought their work fit the theme, although we will never know. For Enwezor, what was most important was always how well artists worked with subject matter, rather than the “goodness” of the subject matter itself.

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Photography was perennially one of Enwezor’s strongest suits. This show includes LaToya Ruby Frazier’s extraordinary documentary photographs of three generations of Black women whose lives are bound to the boom-and-bust fate of the industrial town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, the home of what was once a massive steel mill. The work, made in the aughts, conjures that of social-photographic geniuses Gordon Parks and Dorothea Lange, among others — Frazier is that great. Braddock and its people were left for dead; Frazier captures the normalcy of life there — how people come to live with and take care of themselves in the face of national neglect.

Dawoud Bey’s series “The Birmingham Project” gets at what happens when white America intercedes more overtly. It is made up of black-and-white diptych portraits that make explicit the toll of the KKK’s 1963 murders of four black girls in a bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church. On one side of each diptych, we see a black child who is the same age that one of the murdered children was in 1963; on the other side is a portrait of an adult who is the age that child would have been today. This heartbreakingly stripped-down idea turns infinite: Every person who is killed loses not only everything they have but everything they were ever going to have. Bey’s chasm of sorrow becomes almost bottomless.

“Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America” is on view at New Museum, 235 Bowery, through June 6.

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Courtesy of: Vulture