“The ten, nine-foot tall double-sided structures is my new 21st century monument dedicated to the New York Liberty 2024 championship team.”
On July 3, BSE Global, parent company of 2024 WNBA Champion New York Liberty, the Brooklyn Nets and Barclays Center, alongside its Vice Chair Clara Wu Tsai revealed The Liberty Portraits: A Monument to the 2024 Champions, a new public art installation by renowned artist LaToya Ruby Frazier honoring the 2024 WNBA championship team, now on display on the plaza at Barclays Center.
The series, Frazier’s first outdoor installation, celebrates the New York Liberty as professional athletes, reflecting the power of female leadership, influence, diversity, love for the game of basketball and family. Referencing the heroic scale of the Statue of Liberty, Frazier designed double-sided, nine-foot-tall portraits of each player on the 2024 roster presented in architectural display cases—one side featuring a portrait of a player in uniform, and the reverse side showcasing an image of the same player with their chosen family. To make the latter portraits, Frazier visited the players in locations meaningful to them, including spending time with Jonquel Jones’ family in the Bahamas and visiting players in Texas, Arkansas and Alabama, among other locations. Known for incorporating storytelling in her work, Frazier’s portraits also include the voice of a loved one chosen by each player as first-person testimonies on text panels. The Liberty Portraits: A Monument to the 2024 Champions will be on display through the 2025 WNBA season.
https://latoyarubyfrazier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LRF_logo_2016.png00Webmasterhttps://latoyarubyfrazier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LRF_logo_2016.pngWebmaster2025-07-03 07:39:002025-12-05 16:43:31LaToya Ruby Frazier on The Liberty Portraits
“I can speak through photographs about how I feel about my lived experience in America and pay homage to people who are also everyday working people.”
A photographer finds “healing” in the representation of Black working-class histories.
Photographer and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier sees the legacy of the Black women of America’s working class in Lee Friedlander’s “Ohio Factory Valley” series. Through her personal memories and close observation, these lesser-known photographs become “knockouts” that empower the women they depict.. On the occasion of her timely exhibition “Monuments of Solidarity” at MoMA, Frazier traces the trajectory of documentary photography, from these two inspiring photographs to her approach of collaborative “visual healing.”
In the online edition of MoMA’s ArtSpeaks program, we invite staff members, artists, and special guests to share personal impressions of an artwork in the collection. Here, photographer and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s impassioned reflection centers on Lee Friedlander’s Ohio Factory Valley series, which highlights the legacy and contributions of Black working women in America’s Rust Belt. For Frazier, these images, which document these women’s longstanding role in the US workforce, provide “visual healing.” She invites us to explore the thoughtfulness of Friedlander’s photographs, where we find traces of influence on Frazier’s own practice and her approach to photography as a visual storytelling and social-justice device.
https://latoyarubyfrazier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LRF_logo_2016.png00Webmasterhttps://latoyarubyfrazier.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/LRF_logo_2016.pngWebmaster2024-07-22 12:34:012026-02-02 11:03:34LaToya Ruby Frazier on Lee Friedlander’s Ohio Factory Valley Series
The Museum of Modern Art May 22, 2024 6:00–7:30 PM
In conjunction with the exhibition LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, A Credo on Solidarity is an evening of creative responses to the credo artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier laid out in her newly published essay “Photograph by Faith Not by Sight: Valleys, Rivers and Spirit.” The program begins with a live reading of the essay by LaToya Ruby Frazier, followed by brief responses from poets Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan, artist and former steelworker Sandra Gould Ford, performance artists Liz Magic Laser and Wendy Osserman, artist Shala Miller, and scholar Imani Perry.
Presenters
LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her artistic practice spans a range of mediums, including photography, video, performance, installations, and books, and centers on the nexus of social justice, cultural change, and commentary on the American experience. In various interconnected bodies of work, Frazier uses collaborative storytelling with the people who appear in her artwork to address topics of industrialism, Rust Belt revitalization, environmental justice, access to healthcare, access to clean water, workers’ rights, human rights, family, and communal history. This builds on her commitment to the legacy of 1930s social documentary work and 1960s and ’70s conceptual photography that address urgent social and political issues of everyday life. Frazier is the recipient of many honors and awards including an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Edinboro University (2019), an honorary doctorate of fine arts from Pratt Institute (2017), and fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s MacArthur Genius Award (2015) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2014).
Shea Phire Cobb lives and works in Flint, Michigan, where she was also born and raised. She is an artist, mother, author, musician, and founder of The Sister Tour, a platform that promotes female artistry. She began her artistic career by performing poetry during children’s summer programs and organizing poetry showcases in her community. Her books of poetry include Travels in My Car: Dedicated to the Writers Freedom (2018), Honey Tea and Hibiscus: Reflective Heart Poetry (2018), and Ruby in the Rough: A Dedication to LaToya Ruby Frazier (2020), which she co-authored with Amber Hasan. She studied communications at the University of Michigan–Flint and Mott Community College. In 2014, she began an ongoing collaboration with LaToya Ruby Frazier focused on the Flint water crisis. With Frazier and The Sister Tour, Cobb has traveled across the country telling the story of her community and the Flint water crisis. She has led programs at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where she also performed the original play Surviving Womanhood.
Sandra Gould Ford is an author, photographer, and former steelworker. A University of Pittsburgh graduate, Ford has created an illustrated international quarterly, produced writer conferences, and developed a writing program for the incarcerated. Her goals are to encourage, refresh, and enrich creative thinking, and to inspire, lift hearts and spirits, and promote awareness and humanity. Her work is influenced by Roger Rosenblatt’s four purposes for writing: to make suffering endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible.
Amber Hasan is a Muslim, mother, grandmother, wife, artist, herbalist, and community activist. She is also the cofounder of the woman-focused creative collective The Sister Tour and a member of the Earthwork Music Collective. Hasan has released two solo EPs, Loud Mouth Ghetto Girl and Regular Brown Girl, and the collaborative album Cedar Stage Surprise with Seth Bernard and Dan Rickabus. She has published three books of poetry: Drowning in My Own Spit, Ruby In The Rough (with Shea Cobb), and The Amerikkkan Nightmare (with Zahid Hasan). Hasan also wrote and produced the short film Good Intentions.
Liz Magic Laser is a multimedia video and performance artist from New York City. Her recent work explores the efficacy of new age techniques and psychological methods active in both corporate culture and political movements. Laser’s work has been shown at such venues as the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2023), Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2023), ICA Boston (2023), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022), Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021), and MUDAM the Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg (2021). Her work has been critically acclaimed in publications such as Texte zur Kunst, Artforum, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Frieze, and Art in America.
Wendy Osserman has studied many dance forms, including modern dance with Martha Graham, José Limòn, and Hanya Holm. She performed as a soloist with Valerie Bettis, Alice Condodina, Kei Takei, Frances Alenikoff, and the Hellenic Chorodrama, and she started the Wendy Osserman Dance Company (WODC) in 1976. Osserman has choreographed over 20 full-length pieces, as well as many shorter works in collaboration with outstanding dancers, visual artists, and composers. WODC has been presented in most NYC dance venues, including 92nd Street Y, Joe’s Pub, BAC, Dixon Place, Joyce SoHo, Symphony Space, La MaMa, and Theater for the New City.
Shala Miller, also known as Freddie June when she sings, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, by two southerners named Al and Ruby. At around the age of 10 or 11, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that this is where she should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find her way out, and find her way into an understanding of herself and her history, using photography, video, writing, and singing as aids in this process.
Imani Perry is Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality and of African and African American Studies and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Her book South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation won the 2022 National Book Award for nonfiction. Perry is the author of seven other books, including Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem. As a cultural critic, Perry has written for publications including Harpers, the Atlantic, and the New York Times Magazine. In 2021, her profile of Gayl Jones was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. In 2023, Perry was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. She lives in Philadelphia and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
LaToya Ruby Frazier Interview From HBO’s “A Choice of Weapons Inspired by Gordon Parks”
Life Stories Individual Lives. Creative Impact.
“Our mind sees in images. We have dreams of how we want things to be around us. We need a radical documentary work. It’s about questioning things and interrogating things.”
LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her artistic practice spans a range of media, including photography, video, performance, installation art and books, and centers on the nexus of social justice, cultural change, and commentary on the American experience. Frazier uses collaborative storytelling with the people who appear in her artwork to address topics of industrialism, Rust Belt revitalization, environmental justice, access to healthcare, access to clean water, Workers’ Rights, Human Rights, family, and communal history. Frazier’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions in the US and Europe, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; Musée des Arts Contemporains, Grand-Hornu, Belgium; CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France; Carré d’Art – musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, France; The Frost Art Museum, Miami; The Musée d’art Moderne, Luxembourg; and The Newcomb Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans. In 2015, her first book The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014) about how her family survived environmental racism in historic steel mill town Braddock Pennsylvania received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award. In 2020, Frazier was named the inaugural recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book prize for her book Flint Is Family In Three Acts about how working-class families survived the man-made water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Brooklyn Museum; Whitney Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and many others. Frazier is the recipient of many honors and awards including fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s MacArthur Fellows Program (2015), TED Fellows (2015), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2014).
LaToya Ruby Frazier: More Than Conquerors Featuring LaToya Ruby Frazier and Jessica Holmes, with Madison McCartha Monday, April 10, 2023 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific
Visual artist, photographer, and advocate LaToya Ruby Frazier joins Rail Art Editor Jessica Holmes for a conversation. We conclude with a poetry reading by Madison McCartha.
The Museum of Modern Art November 18, 2022 9:30 AM–4:15 PM
Organized by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator of Photography, and Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Photography, The Museum of Modern Art
9:30–9:40 a.m. Opening statement Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator of Photography, Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, MoMA
10:00–11:30 Session I: Black Feminist Worldbuilding
“Speaking to Zion: Photography, Monumentality and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Black Feminist World-Building” Presented by Leigh Raiford, Professor of African American Studies, University of California, Berkeley, and inaugural director of the Black Studies Collaboratory
“Black Feminist Practice and the Testimonial Archive in the Work of LaToya Ruby Frazier” Presented by Terrion Williamson, Associate Professor of Black Studies and Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Illinois, Chicago, and director of the Black Midwest Initiative
“From an Intergenerational Perch: LaToya Ruby Frazier’s On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford” Presented by Emilie Boone, Assistant Professor of Art History, New York University
11:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Roundtable I: Narrative and the Activist Camera Moderated by Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Associate Curator, Robert B. Menschel Department of Photography, MoMA
Panelists: Sarah Lewis, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture and African and African American Studies, Harvard University, and Founder, The Vision & Justice Project Michal Raz-Russo, Programs Director, The Gordon Parks Foundation Jessica Bell Brown, Curator and Department Head for Contemporary Art, Baltimore Museum of Art
2:00–3:00 Session II: Histories of Deindustrialization
“Denim Destruction: LaToya Ruby Frazier Reveals Latent Labor Histories” Presented by Delphine Sims, PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley
“Photography at the Factory Gates” Presented by Benjamin Young, Faculty Associate in Art History, Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts, Arizona State University
3:00–4:00 Roundtable II: The Political Space of Labor Moderated by Brent Hayes Edwards, Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University, and 2021–22 Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence, MoMA
Panelists: Amber Wiley, Assistant Professor of Art History, Rutgers University Donna Murch, Associate Professor of History, Rutgers University
