LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Labor of Love
The photographer’s first Chicago solo show centers on workers at a beleaguered GM factory in Ohio.
Chicago Magazine
by Jake Malooey
Last November, LaToya Ruby Frazier got wind of the kind of news she finds both troubling and creatively motivating. General Motors was planning to close five North American plants in the coming year. The first would be in Lordstown, Ohio, where the since-discontinued Chevrolet Cruze was made. Thousands of workers there would be either out of a job or forced to relocate.
“I was thinking about how that many workers being laid off or made to move so far from their aging parents and children was going to have a catastrophic domino effect,” Frazier says. It was a familiar story for the 37-year-old photographer. Though she has lived here since 2014, when she took an associate professorship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her true home and artistic wellspring is Braddock, Pennsylvania, a steel mill town outside Pittsburgh that the state has categorized for three decades as “financially distressed.”
Photos: Courtesy of LaToya Ruby Frazier and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise New York/Rome
“You can’t be from Braddock and not make the human connection when you hear of a factory closure,” she says. “That’s in my DNA. I wanted to be there for the workers in Lordstown at that difficult time and be a witness and a champion and an advocate to them, their stories, and their perspectives.” Those images are the subject of her first-ever Chicago solo show, The Last Cruze, at the Renaissance Society.
In recent years, Frazier has emerged as one of the most incisive American artists of her generation, directly addressing the precariousness of the working class. For her 2014 book, The Notion of Family — which helped lead the MacArthur Foundation to award her with a “genius” grant — she trained her lens for 14 years on herself, her hometown, and her family. Her subjects included her grandmother’s stepfather, Gramps, whose body Frazier observed breaking down from age and decades of labor in Braddock’s Edgar Thomson Steel Works, Andrew Carnegie’s first mill. In the 2016 series Flint Is Family, she devoted six months to the aftermath of that city’s water crisis, particularly how it affected three generations of black women from a single family (the project is still ongoing).
Courtesy of: Chicago Magazine
