Smithsonian Magazine
By Shantay Robinson

Explore the enduring bonds and intimacies of modern love at the National Portrait Gallery

In the self-portrait, the artist is holding their baby behind a screen door; in their eyes is a look of intense love, and their tender embrace of the child is deeply moving. The 2018 photograph by Jess T. Dugan, titled Self-portrait with Elinor (screen), depicts the typical adoration of a parent for a child, but the image is especially profound because Dugan is gender nonbinary, and their partner is a cisgender woman.

“In my practice, I’ve always fused a classical style of photographing with a very contemporary subject matter,” Dugan says. “And that’s a strategy I use to bring attention to queerness and different kinds of identity when thinking about sexuality.” Dugan’s art is among more than 40 stunning works on view in the new exhibition “Kinship,” now on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

The paintings and images in the show embrace new approaches to portraiture, once a genre of art reserved for the wealthy. And these time-defying photographic series and unconventional painted portraits of those near and dear also demonstrate how the notion of family is changing.

“I think there is this accessibility of the camera that makes for this democratization,” says Leslie Ureña, curator of photographs at the museum. “These artists are taking the medium that can at once seem accessible, but they are making fine art projects that can also trace histories through their works.”

[…]

LaToya Ruby Frazier, who received the MacArthur Fellowship in 2015, found a kindred spirit while producing a photographic essay of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis for Elle magazine.

In 2014, city officials made the decision to switch the town’s water supply from a treated source to a non-treated cheaper alternative, exposing the people of Flint to a staggering increase in the amount of lead in their water. An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia, coincided with the water crisis. Today, the water is deemed safe after hundreds of millions of dollars spent repairing the town’s infrastructure, but residents continue to mistrust the water supply, with many refusing to drink from the tap.

Family doesn’t simply stop at the blood line, it expands throughout culture and society as you meet people.

— LaToya Ruby Frazier

While covering this crisis, Frazier met Flint resident Shea Cobb, a poet and activist. The two formed a deep bond as Black women with a working-class background and a deep commitment to resisting environmental contamination—Frazier describes the relationship as “kindred spirits in two bodies.”

The black-and-white images in this series are observant of how life continues even as environmental disasters infringe on daily activities. Images of the subjects going about their normal routines despite not having basic needs showcase the people of Flint’s incredible endurance.

In one photo, Cobb pours water from a store-bought plastic bottle into her daughter’s mouth, so she can brush her teeth. The image captures the split second when the water flows from the bottle, just before it lands in the young girl’s mouth.

“Flint Is Family In Three Acts,” “The Lams of Ludlow Street” and other photographic series in the show demonstrate the many years these photographers have spent with their subjects, chronicling the extent to which they have become kin. “You can track time in a different way through their projects, through the camera and through their photographs,” Urena argues.

[…]

Read more…

Courtesy of: Smithsonian Magazine

Andscape
By Lonnae O’Neal

Artists offer a counterbalance to mainstream conceptions of family

Kinship, a new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, explores the complexities of how people connect. And much like the notion of kinship itself, familial or fictive or forged, what we find are multilayered stories of togetherness.

The exhibit is the latest in a series looking at new conceptions of portraiture. Curators brought together the work of eight artists working on iterations of family in painting, photo, sculpture, video and performance.

Those explorations raised issues of inequities and environmental degradation in Black communities and violence against Indigenous people. They offered counterbalances to mainstream conceptions of family. They anchored themselves in the ways we choose family, “not just the legal and blood relations established by law,” said Leslie Ureña, curator of photographs.

The artists explored how relationships become undone and re-formed, and affinities for strangers who reminded them of themselves, Ureña said. They were looking beyond death, for ways to “keep in touch, more or less, with people who have passed.”

[…]

The series Flint is Family in Three Acts by LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose work documents social justice and cultural change, was initially supposed to be a five-month assignment covering the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. It turned into a five-year collaboration with the family she photographed. Her work compels us to understand how the people behind the industries that gave rise to the American century bear the hazards they bequeathed.

Frazier photographed school bus driver and poet Shea Cobb pouring bottled water like a waterfall into her 8-year-old daughter Zion’s mouth so she could brush her teeth. In capturing the lowlight image, Frazier said, “I freeze it just before the water drop hits her tongue to point out to you as the viewer that in the midst of a crisis, she is choosing the lesser of evils here, which is plastic water bottles which is contaminated with plastic cause they sit on pallets in the heat all day before they’re distributed to residents.”

The beauty of this is as a mother, she’s telling her jokes and singing songs because she’s concerned about her daughter’s relationship with water.

Self-Portrait with Shea and Her Daughter, Zion, in the Bedroom Mirror is set in Mississippi, where Cobb’s father has 90 acres of land along with their own freshwater spring, part of an inheritance of resilience. Cobb looks into the mirror with family photos arrayed around her, and her image is visible in the mirror Zion is looking into, as is the image of Frazier herself. “I’m careful about the legacy of Black women and how we’ve been behind each other generation after generation, regardless of how this country continues to put these types of pitfalls in our way,” Frazier said.

Frazier said she viewed Zion “as a double portrait because I was 8 years old when our water was contaminated in Braddock, Pennsylvania. So I’m also a survivor of these types of systemic and structural environmental justice issues.”

“I knew what it was like to be 8 years old and living in a postindustrial economy, a postindustrial landscape of nothing but contamination, and racism in the health care system. And knowing I couldn’t do anything for myself when I was 8. But here I can stand up for this young girl and her mother today and advocate through the photographs, through the telling of the story. But most of all, I created this family album for Zion,” said Frazier.

[…]

Read more…

Courtesy of: Andscape

HUB
Johns Hopkins University

Award-winning photo series was inspired by the work of Johns Hopkins physician-researcher Lisa Cooper, her colleagues, and the community health workers who supported and served Baltimore neighborhoods during the pandemic

---

Lisa Cooper, Founder of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity, met LaToya Ruby Frazier in 2015 at The Contemporary, a nomadic, Baltimore-based non-collecting museum that engages audiences through subject-oriented projects and educational programming. During that dialogue on creative approaches to improve society, the Liberian-born physician-researcher and the artist from Braddock, Pennsylvania, realized they were working on similar problems, using approaches informed by their unique professional and lived experiences. And Frazier became inspired by Cooper’s observation that her photographic installations could be valuable to health professionals and public health researchers working to advance health equity.

One of the nation’s leading researchers on health disparities and the creator of interventions that empower patients from socially marginalized groups to take more active roles in their care, Cooper saw in Frazier’s photography (including a series centered on Frazier’s own family) the health implications of economic distress and social inequities. Frazier captured in the series, for example, her community’s failed plight to save their local hospital from closure in 2011.

“Her art gives voice to people from marginalized groups in society who experience poor health as a result of that marginalization”

— Lisa Cooper

Cooper, a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins who founded and leads the Center for Health Equity. “And I’ve used my expertise and platform as a physician and public health scientist to shed light on those same kinds of issues.”

Cooper also noted the similarities between Frazier’s artwork and “photovoice,” a storytelling technique used by the public health field that places cameras in the hands of participants to document their daily lives.

Cooper and Frazier, both MacArthur Fellows, crossed paths over the years as Frazier continued highlighting communities on the brink: families suffering through the Flint, Michigan water crisis, auto production workers laid off in Lordstown, Ohio, former coal mine workers in Belgium. When Frazier’s mother faced a health crisis, their relationship took a more personal turn as Cooper navigated the family toward one of her colleagues in Pittsburgh.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the two friends found their first opportunity to work collaboratively. Cooper pointed Frazier’s attention to an unsung group in Baltimore: the community health workers who were on the ground helping residents with critical resources and information about preventing the spread of coronavirus. “I didn’t think their stories were getting told enough,” Cooper says. “People seemed to understand the role of doctors and nurses in the pandemic, but not CHWs. They weren’t heard, or seen as the heroes they are.”

[…]

Read more…

Courtesy of: HUB Johns Hopkins University