LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Monuments to Workers
by Lovia Gyarkye
Hammer & Hope
The artist works with her collaborators to try to “invert and redistribute wealth and power.”
On a cool evening in May, LaToya Ruby Frazier gathered with friends and strangers in a basement theater at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The communion was a public event tied to the artist’s new exhibition, Monuments of Solidarity, surveying more than two decades of photographic work. After a brief introduction by the curator Roxana Marcoci, Frazier walked over to a podium at the front of the room. She wore a blue silk suit, and her hair, a dark brown mass with sandy highlights, was styled into an afro. The artist looked like a figure pulled straight from Barkley L. Hendricks’s ethereal portraits.
“I’ve used my camera as a compass to direct a pathway toward the illuminated truth of the indomitable spirit of working-class families and communities in the 21st century,” Frazier said, reading from a recent essay. “For this reason, it is incumbent upon me to resist — one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time — historical erasure and historical amnesia.”
This essay, which is printed in full at the beginning of the exhibition catalog, defined the center of the evening’s program, “A Credo on Solidarity,” which included a suite of creative responses to Frazier’s philosophy from other artists and scholars. The poets Shea Cobb and Amber Hasan performed spoken word, reading a long poem from a large brown scroll they unfurled onstage. Sandra Gould Ford, an artist, educator, and former steelworker, presented a slideshow illustrating Frazier’s thesis with photos, quotes and videos. There was sound art, featuring June Jordan’s 1982 poem “Moving Towards Home,” by Shala Miller; a biographical essay by the scholar Imani Perry; and an affecting dance by the video and performance artist Liz Magic Laser and her mother, the choreographer and dancer Wendy Osserman.
These pieces not only embodied the ideas in Frazier’s credo — subjectivity, power, art as a means of healing — they also testified to a critical component of the artist’s work. At the heart of Monuments of Solidarity is the artist’s devotion to collaboration. Frazier was raised Baptist, and her faith is a clarifying tool for understanding her practice. She believes in empathetic listening and frequently cites agape love — a Christian idea that promotes selfless and unconditional care for others — as a principal tenet. Like James Baldwin, whom the artist counts among her influences, Frazier positions herself as an interlocutor, someone “called to stand in the gap between the working class and creative class communities.”
Several of the participants in “A Credo on Solidarity” had made images with her before. Frazier met Cobb and Hasan while working on Flint Is Family in Three Acts (2016–20), a study of the government-made water crisis in the beleaguered Michigan city. She and Ford collaborated on the series On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford (2017), which featured Frazier’s photographs alongside Ford’s images to tell the story of labor conditions in a steel manufacturing company in Pittsburgh, Pa. By forging enduring alliances with her subjects — collaborating on art projects, designing a profit-sharing model that funnels resources back into the community, and giving people in the photographs final say on any accompanying text — the artist has upended the conventional dynamics of documentary photography. Her images are historical correctives that dignify working-class communities previously denied such recognition.
Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Jonathan Dorado/MoMA.
“It’s always been a dream of mine to have a museum of workers’ thoughts,” Frazier, 42, told me two weeks before her communion of collaborators at MoMA. “What would it look like if there were monuments erected for workers and their families and their descendants instead of industrial capitalists?” We were sitting in a nondescript room in the museum, surrounded by tokens of a muted office life — dusty windows, an empty desk — and signed copies of Frazier’s exhibition catalog. In just a few days, her sprawling exploration of workers past, present, and future would open to the public.
Monuments of Solidarity, on view through Sept. 7, comes at an energizing time for the U.S. labor movement. From UPS drivers to Hollywood writers and actors, workers have won big contracts that guarantee higher wages, better health insurance, and stronger job protections. Even though union density remains stubbornly low, a majority of Americans support unions and more than half a million employees participated in hundreds of strikes across the country in 2023. Frazier’s show meets the demands of this moment by sharing the lessons of recent labor rights actions and presenting a record of contemporary civic engagement more generally. From chronicling how the local United Auto Workers union in Lordstown, Ohio, protected employees impacted by the General Motors plant closure to showing Flint residents using innovative technology to procure clean water for themselves, Frazier’s images affirm how crucial collaboration and information exchange among the working class is to liberation work. “I’m concerned with getting the general public more knowledge about certain laws and policies that are impacting our basic human rights,” Frazier said. “We don’t have time to wait on our elected officials or mass media to tell the right stories or the full truth.” Viewers are encouraged not only to identify with other workers but also to connect the dots of their oppression and, eventually, enact change in their own communities.
Across the exhibition’s eight rooms, Frazier has erected monuments composed of photographs, extensive first-person testimonies, video projections, and audio pieces that detail how people in the United States survive government negligence and corporate greed. They span the length of her career, from the deeply intimate images of her mother and grandmother to her homage to the labor activist Dolores Huerta. The artist choreographs objects in each room, arranging the images, text, and video and sculptural and architectural installations to encourage different kinds of meditation. “The way she has rethought both conceptual and documentary art practices to create what is truly an artistic activist practice is what attracted me to her,” Marcoci said of Frazier and her work. To the curator, this exhibition is “not about representing people exclusively through [Frazier’s] lens, but through their own testimony.”
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Courtesy of: Hammer & Hope
