LaToya Ruby Frazier: WITNESS features photographs, videos, digital works, and a recent photolithograph series that speak to these conditions. Frazier documents Braddock’s deterioration with an unflinching eye and a gift for communicating through documentary images that connects her to other socially engaged practitioners like American photographers Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Gordon Parks.
As she sees it, Frazier’s work is “the story of economic globalization and the decline of manufacturing as told through the bodies of three generations of African American women.” The primary players in this story are Frazier’s Grandma Ruby (b. 1925-2009), her Mom (b. 1959) and the artist herself (b. 1982). This exhibition includes a selection of more than 20 black-and-white photographs from the artist’s renowned Notion of Family series. The core of this exhibition is a selection of experimental self-portraits shot by the artist in collaboration with her Mom, who is a co-author, artist, and subject in her own right. Their unified self-portraits complicate and expand notions of portraiture and suggest new forms of social and political engagement. LaToya Ruby Frazier: WITNESS also includes the digital videosMomme Wrestle (2010) and Self Portrait (United States Steel) (2010), in which we see Frazier extending her practice into new media.
Most recently, Frazier’s documentary explorations have considered Braddock as a paradigm for the entwined relationship between an individual and her environment. Grandma Ruby died from complications related to pancreatic cancer, Mom suffers from cancer and an undiagnosed neurological disorder, and Frazier herself suffers from lupus. She believes their illnesses are-in part-due to exposure to environmental toxins released by the steel mills. In a broader holistic sense though, Frazier sees the illnesses experienced by her family and many other individuals in Braddock as the psychosomatic results of the internalization of social bias: “We were demonized as bad, poor, black drug addicts. Every stereotype you can think of is what I grew up seeing in the media.”
Frazier’s recent photolithograph and silkscreen print series Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital) (2011) is a critical assessment of a Levi’s ad campaign that was shot on location in Braddock which many residents found patently offensive. According to Frazier: “they’re promoting a romanticized idea of this ‘urban pioneer,’ and they have no clue about those of us in Braddock who have been here all along, fighting for access to safe housing and health care.” Overlaying original and appropriated images with textual commentary, Frazier draws attention to the concerted efforts of the activist group Save Our Community Hospital during protests against the closure of a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center facility in Braddock. The photographs Landscape of the Body (Epilepsy Test) (2011), U.P.M.C. Braddock Hospital and Holland Avenue Parking Lot (2011), and the video DETOX (Braddock U.P.M.C.) (2011) address the reverberations of the shuttering and demolition of this facility in 2010-2011, while U.P.M.C. simultaneously constructed a new $250M facility in an affluent Pittsburgh suburb.
In the face of these hardships, or perhaps precisely because of them, citizens in Braddock have been mobilizing to take matters into their own hands. The community endures. Forged in this crucible, Frazier’s documentary practice is a form of visual propaganda that is deeply concerned with how power can be identified, claimed, and redirected. While popular opinion may assert that a participant driven by her emotional connections to an issue may be too biased to see a situation clearly, Frazier’s work communicates her concerns with the utmost clarity and conviction. Even as she addresses urgent issues, emotion never clouds her vision, but instead affords it a compelling authenticity. The precision, economy, and honesty of Frazier’s delivery make her stories so available that, like a mirror, it lets us see ourselves in her work. LaToya Ruby Frazier: WITNESS is curated by Dean Daderko, CAMH Curator, and will be on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston from November 12-March 2, 2014.
In conjunction with this exhibition, Frazier will work with students in Jack Yates High School’s photography magnet program to produce their own documentary photographic works around the theme: “Capturing and Contesting the Changing Face of Houston’s Third Ward.” The school is located in the Third Ward, a historically African American neighborhood. In 2013 Katharine Shilcutt of the Houston Press observed that “the Third Ward possesses a dynamic mix of old and new as the area slowly undergoes a slow gentrification process: beautiful brick homes abutting wonderfully divey restaurants like Chief Cajun Snack Shack, 80-year-old meat markets turned into vegan coffee shops, non-profit arts organizations such as Project Row Houses side-by-side with still-occupied row houses.” Working with Frazier, these Yates photographers will document evidence of the gentrification of their community, and an exhibition of the resulting artworks will be on view in CAMH’s Cullen Education Resource Room, September 1 – October 13, 2013, in tandem with Frazier’s show.
