Baltimore Museum of Art acquires LaToya Ruby Frazier installation honouring community healthcare workers
The Art Newspaper
by Torey Akers
The installation spotlights health workers that helped underserved communities in Baltimore at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic
© LaToya Ruby Frazier, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery.
The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) has acquired LaToya Roby Frazier’s arresting installation More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland 2021-2022 (2022). The piece consists of 66 inkjet prints featuring portraits and didactics mounted on 18 socially distanced, steel intravenous drip poles, a solemn reflection of and monument to the role of community healthcare workers (CHWs)—many of them women of colour—at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The work has been gifted to the BMA by the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland. More Than Conquerors presents an alternative methodology to commemoration, centering marginalised voices and communities disproportionately affected by America’s for-profit healthcare system. Originally developed for the 58th Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, More Than Conquerors won the coveted Carnegie Prize before arriving at Gladstone Gallery in New York this spring. The installation will begin its tenure at the BMA in 2025, where it will kick off a year-long environmental awareness initiative.
“More Than Conquerors reflects the distinct quality of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s artistry and her innate ability to encapsulate stories of profound personal and communal meaning,” Asma Naeem, the BMA’s director, said in a statement. “The installation offers a poignant tribute to some of the most important but under-acknowledged heroes of our community.”
Frazier’s work on More Than Conquerors grew from her relationship with Lisa Cooper, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Bloomberg School of Public Health and director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Equity. Frazier was inspired to develop a project addressing healthcare inequity after experiencing discrimination while attempting to get vaccinated for Covid-19. She was moved to focus on the lives and histories of the chronically undersung CHWs, who help underserved populations navigate with the infamously byzantine healthcare systems of the United States.
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Courtesy of: The Art Newspaper
