LaToya Ruby Frazier at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise New York
LaToya Ruby Frazier: A mother and her son speaking to a news-reporter outside North Western High School (est. 1964) awaiting the arrival of President Barack Obama, May 4th 2016 Flint MI 2016, 2016/17, gelatin silver print, 20 by 24 inches; at Gavin Brown’s enterprise.
Art in America Magazine
April 1, 2018
by David Markus
The hallmark of LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographic work has been its blend of the political and the everyday. Often cited as an heir to Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks, she uses her artistic practice to advocate for racial and economic justice, particularly on the part of communities blighted by deindustrialization. Frazier began photographing her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, when she was still a teenager, producing a series of photographs that would help earn her a 2015 MacArthur fellowship. Over the years her photography has brought her as far afield as Belgium, where she created a series centered on a former coal-mining community in the Borinage region. For her recent survey exhibition, she covered the exterior of Gavin Brown’s four-story gallery in Harlem with a forty-by-twenty-foot vinyl print of three vertically arranged photographs, each depicting a single word spelled out in water bottles inserted into a chain-link fence alongside a commercial thruway in Flint, Michigan. Together, the words read, WATER IS LIFE. It’s an SOS from the Midwestern town that has become an emblem of gross municipal negligence in this era of extreme inequality.
Courtesy of: Art in America Magazine
