LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American artist.

Frazier reports drawing and painting from a young age, and credits her Grandma Ruby's with setting high expectations for her achievements.

Since 2009, she has been included in a range of major group exhibitions, including the New Museum's The Generational Triennial: Younger Than Jesus, MoMA PS1's "Greater New York: 2010, the 2011 Incheon Women Artists' Biennale Terra Incognita, and the 2012 Whitney Biennial.

Her solo museum exhibition, A Haunted Capital, opened at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013. Additionally, she was part of the 2009-2010 cohort of artists who participated in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace residency program.

In 2014, Frazier published her first book, The Notion of Family, which received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award.

The photographic work of LaToya Ruby Frazier includes both images of personal spaces, intensely private moments and the story of racial and economic injustice in America. Her work includes raw portraits of friends and family members in intimate moments and examples of social injustice. As Frazier explains, "the collaboration between my family and myself blurs the line between self-portraiture and social documentary" Often her work focuses on the plight of her home town of Braddock, Pennsylvania which became financially depressed after the collapse of the steel industry in the 1970-80s. With black and white photographs, Frazier highlights the beauty of Braddock and how this town has impacted her family's life along with other residents. Her still photographs have a raw sense of strength and vulnerability juxtaposed in an honest and personal way. Besides working on her most famous work Notion of Family, Frazier has worked with other contemporary issues such as the Flint water crisis. This particular project, Flint is Family, depicts and focuses on a young woman and her family living their everyday lives amongst the crucial water conditions within their lower class Flint community. She recently contributed photographs to a New York Times project, "Why America's Black Mothers and Babies are in a Life-or-Death Crisis".

Informed by documentary practices from the turn of the last century, Frazier explores identities of place, race, and family in work that is a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative. Her primary subjects of these portraits are Frazier's Grandma Ruby (1925-2009), her mother (b. 1959), and the artist herself. The crumbling landscape of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving steel town, forms the backdrop of her images, which make manifest both the environmental and infrastructural decay caused by postindustrial decline and the lives of those who continue-largely by necessity-to live among it. As Frazier says, "I see myself as an artist and a citizen that's documenting and telling the story and building the archive of working-class families facing all this change that's happening, because it has to be documented." Through her own family she has been able to recount the history of Braddock by way of the generations who experienced it. Her work begins dialogues about class structure, history, and social responsibility.

A 2018 special issue of Atlantic Magazine featured aerial photography and an essay by Frazier documenting the impact of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. on the landscapes of Memphis, Chicago and Baltimore. Frazier's work was featured in the 2019 New York Times Magazine Money Issue for her photo essay on the people of Lordstown, Ohio, after the General Motors plant shut down.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024