#LaToya Ruby Frazier

[joeinct]

Mom Making an Image of Me, Photo by LaToya Ruby Frazier, 2008

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LaToya Ruby Frazier, Sandra Gould Ford Wearing Her Work Jacket and Hard Hat in Her Meditation Room in Homewood, PA, 2017

From the series On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford

[federer7]

Mom. 2008

Photo: LaToya Ruby Frazier

[notchainedtotrauma]

“Maybe we are not an impossibility.”

 from Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick

from top left to bottom right; LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ming Smith, Kennedi Carter, Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Ming Smith, Kennedi Carter, Elliott Jerome Brown Jr., Kennedi Carter

[kourotrophos]

Landscape of the Body(Epilepsy Test)

LaToya Ruby Frazier(American, born 1982), 2011, photograph, gelatin silver prints, s. The Notion of Family

[obsessioncollector]

LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Landscape of the Body (Epilepsy Test)” (2011)

[colonellickburger]

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Shea Brushing Zion’s Teeth with Bottled Water in Her Bathroom, Flint, Michigan

[lavoixhumaine]

i can always count on Spike Lee to capture Queen Angela Bassett in the perfect frame and the perfect light.

As he has said about her,

So regal, so majestic

like hell, yes. she is. that protest scene lives in my head rent free, sir.

[burntsoft]

[deadassdiaspore]

[lilithsaintcrow]

"The irony is that dignity and respect for labor are lacking at MoMA, an institution that denies the fact that art making requires workers."

[tarbaby3000]

LaToya Ruby Frazier

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LaToya Ruby Frazier, Women of Steel, 2017 

From the series On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford

[longlistshort]

"Marilyn Moore, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee and Retiree Executive Board, with her General Motors company retirement gold ring on her index finger, (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co., Lear Seating Corp., 32 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, assembly plant, van plant, metal fab, trim shop), Youngstown, OH, 2019" from “The Last Cruze” 2019

"Frances Turnage, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee, holding her 10, 15, and 20 years of service General Motors company anniversary gold bracelets in her dining room, (34 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, paint shop) Youngstown, OH, 2019"  from “The Last Cruze” 2019

LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity, currently on view at MoMA, presents several of the photographer’s bodies of work. Documenting her family, her town, and the hardworking people of several communities- she is telling the important stories of people whose lives are often overlooked.

From the museum about the exhibition-

“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,” says artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier. Born in 1982 in the steel manufacturing town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier has used photography, text, moving images, and performance to revive and preserve forgotten stories of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial era. LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity surveys the full range of the artist’s practice, highlighting her role as a social advocate and connector of the cultural and working classes in the 21st century.

For this exhibition, Frazier has reimagined her diverse bodies of work as a sequence of original installations that she calls “monuments for workers’ thoughts,” which address the harmful effects of industrialization and deindustrialization, the healthcare inequities facing Black working-class communities in the Rust Belt, the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the impact of the closure of a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the expressions of creativity, mutual support, and intergenerational collaboration that persist in light of these denials of fundamental labor, human, and civil rights. As a form of Black feminist world-building, these nontraditional “monuments” demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played and continue to play in histories of labor and the working class.

About The Last Cruze (pictured above) from the museum-

“A monument to the working-class people in this country,” as Frazier has characterized it, The Last Cruze was created in solidarity with the United Auto Workers Locals 1112 and 1714 in Lordstown, Ohio. In 2018 General Motors decided to cease North American production of the Chevrolet Cruze, leading to the “unallocation” and shuttering of the Lordstown assembly plant. Collaborating with Locals 1112 and 1714 members, Frazier made photographs that documented union-led efforts to prevent the closure.

Here more than sixty portraits of white, Black, and Latinx workers as well as images of factory labor are paired with printed excerpts from interviews Frazier conducted. These photographs and texts are displayed on a massive cadmium-red structure that resembles both an assembly line and cathedral buttressing. Framed by walls painted in two blue hues to match General Motors’ logo colors, a film featuring photographs by autoworker and photographer Kasey King follows the very last Cruze coming off the assembly line and the employees whose livelihoods depended on the plant.

“Self-Portrait with Shea and Her Daughter Zion in the Bedroom Mirror, Newton, Mississippi”, from the series “Flint Is Family, Part II”. 2017

“John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie”, 2010

This exhibition closes 9/7/24.

[notchainedtotrauma]

I wanna play for you. I wanna be played for you. I wanna be down with you.

from revision, impromptu by Fred Moten

from top left to bottom right: Nydia Blas, Elliot Jerome Brown Jr,  Roy DeCarava, Kennedi Carter, Gordon Parks, Ming Smith, Kennedi Carter, LaToya Ruby Frazier

[thingstol00kat]

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Monuments of Solidarity

MOMA NYC july 2024