On Sunday, Jan. 14, Gavin Brown’s enterprise (GBE) opened a debut solo exhibition by artist and photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, her largest exhibition in New York to date. Frazier is a 2007 graduate of the master of fine arts degree program in art photography in the College of Visual and Performing Arts‘ Department of Transmedia. The exhibition will run through Sunday, Feb. 25. GBE is located at 439 W. 127th St., New York City.
A photo from LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Flint Is Family” series, which depicts the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
Panel discussions, art-making workshops and performances will be held at GBE in January and February in conjunction with the exhibition “LaToya Ruby Frazier.” All programs are free and open to the public. Learn more on GBE’s website.
A recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2015, Frazier’s artistic practice spans a range of media that incorporates photography, video and performance and centers on the nexus of social justice, cultural change and commentary on the American experience. This exhibition features three distinct recent bodies of work—”Flint is Family,” “The Notion of Family” and “A Pilgrimage to Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum”—whose themes address Frazier’s deeply rooted and long-held concerns exploring the legacies of racism, inequality, economic decline, access to healthcare and environmental justice.
“Flint is Family” (2016-2017), is a series of works exploring the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the effects on its residents. Frazier spent five months with three generations of women—the poet and singer, Shea Cobb; Shea’s mother, Renée Cobb; and her daughter, Zion—living in Flint in 2016, witnessing their day-to-day lives as they lived through one of the most devastating man-made ecological crises in U.S. history. Citing Gordon Parks’ and Ralph Ellison’s 1948 collaboration “Harlem Is Nowhere” as an influence, Frazier utilized mass media as an outlet to reach a broad audience, publishing her images of Flint in conjunction with a special feature on the water disaster in Elle magazine in September 2016. Like Parks, Frazier uses the camera as a weapon and agent of social change.
Frazier’s best-known body of work, “The Notion of Family” (2001-14), is an exploration into her family, her hometown and her own experiences through landscape and portraiture in the deindustrialized steel town of Braddock, Pa. This long-running series was Frazier’s first engagement with themes that would define her career to date: systemic racism, displacement, historical narrative and the aftermath of economic erosion in communities. It too focuses on three generations of women—Frazier’s grandmother, born in 1925 and alive to see her hometown of Braddock thrive under the prosperous steel boom; her mother, who lived in Braddock through the deindustrialization and segregation of the 1960s; and LaToya herself, who grew up during the 1980s “war on drugs” and witnessed the abandonment of her hometown.
“A Pilgrimage to Noah Purifoy’s Desert Art Museum” (2016-2017) was inspired by Frazier’s journey with fellow artist Abigail DeVille to the outdoor museum in the high desert of Joshua Tree. A pioneering force of California assemblage, Purifoy’s practice drew from the varied traditions of Dada, Surrealism and African American yard work. Born in 1917, Purifoy fled his native Alabama for Los Angeles upon returning from World War II. In Frazier’s words, “It struck me deeply, his sense of displacement. After the Watts riots of the mid-1960s, he collected burned materials that ended up in his art. Purifoy had a creative solution to dealing with injustice. Instead of evaporating or being silent, he took these things—pieces of wreckage—and turned them into works of art, a meditation on one’s life, one’s work, one’s history. This is the most powerful act.”
Frazier has been the subject of numerous solo presentations of her work, and recent exhibitions have included the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Seattle Art Museum; the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Musée des Arts Contemporains, Grand-Hornu, Belgium; CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France; Carré d’Art-musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, France; the Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; and the August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh. Her work is included in celebrated international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among others.
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