The Atlantic interviews LaToya Ruby Frazier for MLK Special Issue

ATLANTIC INTERVIEWS
What a Picture From the Sky Reveals About Oppression

In honor of the MLK Special Issue, The Atlantic commissioned artist and photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier to photograph Chicago, Baltimore, and Memphis from the air. In her aerial photography, Frazier explains, the specter of oppression is writ large. “The history is written on that landscape and the body of its inhabitants,” says Frazier. “It became very clear to me how Freddie Gray lived in an environment that is toxic… it just looks like a target from the air.”

Authors: Brianna Pressey, Sophia Myszkowski

Video by The Atlantic

In Conversation: Frazier, Cobb, Hasan, and Moten

LaToya Ruby Frazier with Shea Cobb, Amber Hasan, and Fred Moten

From Flint, Michigan, artists, activists and founders of The Sister Tour, Amber Hasan and Shea Cobb use their personal lives and encounters with the water crisis to serve as a catalyst to help, serve and support teens and women to harness their creative strength in the midst of chaos from Flint, Michigan to Puerto Rico. Fred Moten is Professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Moten teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and critical theory. He is author of many titles, most recently a three-volume collection of essays whose general title is consent not to be a single being (Duke University Press, 2017, 2018). They join LaToya Ruby Frazier in conversation.


Courtesy of: Gavin Brown’s enterprise

In Conversation: Frazier, DeVille, Kitnick, and Lipschutz

LaToya Ruby Frazier, with Abigail DeVille, Alex Kitnick, and Yael Lipschutz

Bronx-based multidisciplinary artist Abigail DeVille’s work touches upon displacement, migration, marginalization, and cultural invisibility. Ashley James is the Assistant Curator of Contemporary Art at the Brooklyn Museum and a scholar whose research reconsiders the relationship between politics, art, and Blackness in the early 1970s. Yael Lipschutz is an independent curator whose recent exhibitions include “Cameron: Songs for the Witchwoman” at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and “Noah Purifoy: Junk Dada” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She serves as a Trustee of the Noah Purifoy Foundation. Together they join LaToya Ruby Frazier for a discussion about artistic practice, creation and displacement, and the legacy of Noah Purifoy.

Courtesy of: Gavin Brown’s enterprise