Lavin Exclusive Speaker
One of the nation’s most acclaimed photographers, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work depicts the stark reality of today’s America: post-industrial cities riven by poverty, racism, healthcare inequality, and environmental toxicity. By featuring voices and perspectives traditionally erased from the American narrative, MacArthur “Genius” Frazier not only captures our cultural blind spots—she teaches us how art is a powerful tool for social transformation.
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s extraordinary body of work includes Flint Is Family: a piercing chronicle of the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Frazier spent five years in a city plagued by poisonous water, documenting the community’s resilience in the face of environmental racism. The original photo essay, for Elle Magazine, was named one of the “25 Most Influential Works of American Protest Art Since World War II” by the New York Times, which called it “a natural extension of her already well-established commitment to social justice.” She collaborated with residents to tell their story and raise funds for a solution, as the project evolved from a photo essay to a video, and now to a 2022 book and exhibition—which celebrate togetherness and family as much as they condemn injustice. Legendary art critic Jerry Saltz calls her “one of the strongest artists to emerge in this country this century.”
The Museum of Modern Art will host an exhibition dedicated to Frazier in 2024. LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity is the first museum survey of her acclaimed career and her commitment to reviving and preserving forgotten stories in the tradition of social documentary. The curator of the exhibition says that Frazier’s artworks “demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played and continue to play within histories of labor and the working class, of who and what is worth celebrating.”
Frazier won the prestigious Carnegie Prize for her artwork More Than Conquerors. The monument, called “urgent and resonant” by the Carnegie Museum’s director, reveals the invisible labor of community health workers on the front lines of the Covid-19 pandemic. Previous winners of the Carnegie Prize include Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso.
Frazier’s recent work includes The Last Cruze, which documents the devastation of a factory town losing its factory. Designed to resemble a production line, the exhibition follows the workers affected by a General Motors plant shutdown in Lordstown, Ohio, after more than half a century of operation. These unflinching photographs of an exploited working class “speak to the imperative to stay together even and especially when driven apart” (Artforum). Frazier also took portraits of Breonna Taylor’s family for the cover story of Vanity Fair. Alongside the latter project, Frazier penned a moving statement about how crucial it was for her to help the family reclaim visual justice by offering humane and dignified representations of Breonna and her loved ones. “My portraits are a call for justice and the unwavering steadfast endurance of Black women in America regardless of the persecution we face on a daily basis,” she wrote.
In her award-winning first book The Notion of Family, Frazier offers a penetrating look at “the legacy of racism and economic decline in America’s small towns.” A haunting photographic account of three generations of Frazier women, the book is simultaneously personal and political: investigating the impact of deindustrialization on working class Black families in the Rust Belt through the “labour-consumed bodies” of her relatives. Her talks, like her breathtaking work, betray a sobering reality: the American dream has not, and does not, work for Black people. As long as environmental injustice, healthcare inequality, and economic racism continue to thrive, the country is failing its Black citizens. With clarity and insight, Frazier shines a light on how art can be used as a tool for transformation and social good across the nation.
In 2020, Frazier was selected as one of nine Storytelling Fellows for National Geographic, where she will complete a year-long project titled ‘Living with Lupus Under COVID-19 in America.’ In it, Frazier will use a personal lens to explore the intersection of racial justice, environmental racism, and the unequal access to medical care in America, as the country faces one of the largest public health crises in modern history. She has received the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She was chosen by Ebony as one of their 100+ Most Powerful Women of All Time. Her work has been exhibited widely, with solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Seattle Art Museum, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. Frazier also shot an aerial photography series depicting Memphis, Baltimore, and Chicago in The Atlantic’s Martin Luther King issue, as well as the movie posters for the Grand Prix-winning Spike Lee film BlacKkKlansman, which tells the true story of an American detective who infiltrated the Colorado Springs KKK. Frazier is the Associate Professor, Photography, at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has previously held academic and curatorial positions at Yale University School of Art, Rutgers University, and Syracuse University.