A creative solution for the water crisis in Flint, Michigan
LaToya spent five months living in Flint, Michigan, documenting the lives of those affected by the city's water crisis for her photo essay Flint is Family. As the crisis dragged on, she realized it was going to take more than a series of photos to bring relief. In this inspiring, surprising TED talk, she shares the creative lengths she went to in order to bring free, clean water to the people of Flint.
Read more • Watch LaToya's talk on TED.com
“The Notion Of Family” – Aperture Foundation
[The Aperture Foundation] sat down with LaToya Ruby Frazier to discuss the realization of her first book, The Notion Of Family, which offers an incisive exploration of the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns, as embodied by her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania.
Twelve years in the making, the work compellingly sets her story of three generations—her Grandma Ruby, her mother, and herself—against larger questions of civic belonging and responsibility. Since beginning the work as a teenager, Frazier has enlisted the participation of her family—and her mother in particular. These images acknowledge and expand upon the traditions of classic black-and-white documentary photography, and are themselves transformative acts, resetting traditional power dynamics and narratives, both those of her family and those of the community at large.
“The Notion Of Family” by LaToya Ruby Frazier is available for purchase here: bit.ly/1kfpabj
Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties
Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties
March 7 – July 6, 2014
Published on May 15, 2014
Artists, including those featured in the exhibition Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, come together for a series of intergenerational conversations and performances dealing with the challenges of cultural activism during the Civil Rights era and today.
Roundtable with Witness artists Jack Whitten, Bruce Davidson, and Mark di Suvero and artists LaToya Ruby Frazier and Abigail DeVille; moderated by Teresa A. Carbone, Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art.
This event took place at the Brooklyn Museum Saturday, May 10, 2014
Framework: Activism, Memory and the Social Landscape
LaToya Ruby Frazier at The American Academy in Berlin
Guna S. Mundheim Artist Talk, March 4, 2014
©2014 The American Academy
Framework: Activism, Memory and the Social Landscape
The abandonment of suburban industrial towns by local and state governments has not been visually documented or accurately covered by the American mass media. With the rise of the “creative class” or “urban pioneers” pitted against the displaced working class, much human suffering experienced by the newly dislocated is overlooked. For over a decade, LaToya Ruby Frazier has been documenting, through photography and video, the collapse of the steel mill industry, environmental negligence, and deindustrialization that has affected her family and community in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a thirteen-block industrial town in the eastern region of Allegheny County. In this lecture, Frazier discussed her work, the importance of documentary photography today, and focused particularly on the intersection of documentary art that represents invisible realities and the importance of cultural memory found in the industrial heritage of towns such as Braddock, Pennsylvania and Eisenhüttenstadt in East Germany.