Edited with text by Roxana Marcoci. Text by Emilie Boone, Carson Chan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Delphine Sims.
Frazier’s personalized arrangements of her compelling photographs recognize the myriad social and political struggles of Black working-class communities
For more than two decades, artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier has used photography, text, moving images and performance to revive and preserve forgotten narratives of labor, gender and race in the postindustrial era. Frazier has cultivated a practice that builds on the legacy of the social documentary tradition of the 1930s, the photo-conceptual forays of the 1960s and 1970s, and the work of socially conscious writers such as Upton Sinclair, James Baldwin and bell hooks. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the creativity and collaboration that persist in the face of industrialization and deindustrialization, racial and environmental injustice, gender disparities, unequal access to health care and clean water, and the denial of fundamental human rights. A form of Black feminist world-building, Frazier’s nontraditional “monuments for workers’ thoughts” 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. Published in conjunction with the first comprehensive museum survey dedicated to the artist, Monuments of Solidarity presents the full range of her practice and includes both rarely seen and brand-new bodies of work. An illuminating overview essay by the exhibition’s curator, Roxana Marcoci, is accompanied by a manifesto by the artist and a suite of focused essays by other curators and scholars. LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her artistic practice spans a range of mediums, including photography, video, performance, installation art and books, and centers on the nexus of social justice, cultural change and commentary on the American experience. Frazier is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Photograph
Lyle Rexer
Groundbreaking in exploring in depth the lives and situations of working people in places of crisis and in giving space to their voices.
The New York Times: Arts
Siddhartha Mitter
Gathering these and other projects, the MoMA survey traces, for the first time in one place, Frazier’s journey toward this kind of civic polyphony.
Guardian
Veronica Esposito
Monuments of Solidarity' makes the case for this maximalist approach to photograph, one in which the photographer is never just a documenter, but an active agent in the story being investigated.
The New York Times: Arts
Holland Cotter
Any serious monument-builder working on the tough joint tasks of truth-telling and healing, must tackle and resolve, again and again. Frazier is such a builder and, in our present thug-threatened moment, a needed one.
4Columns
Ciaran Finlayson
Frazier works with a militant love for the proletariat; her photos extinguish the images of ignorance and bigotry associated, in the Trump-era and today, with talk of the American working class, and counterprograms her audience with pictures from a solidaristic, woman-led, and multiracial movement.
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Although LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work is revered for its social-activist, Black feminist world-building, certain images are also just great photographs—capable of delivering their message well beyond their original context. “Marilyn Moore, UAW Local 1112, Women’s Committee and Retiree Executive Board, (Youngstown Sheet and Tube Co., Lear Seating Corp., 32 years in at GM Lordstown Complex, Assembly Plant, Van Plant, Metal Fab, Trim Shop), with her General Motors retirement gold ring on her index finger, Youngstown, OH,” from Frazier's 2019 The Last Cruze series, is such an image. “Like the photographer and filmmaker Gordon Parks, Frazier has chosen the radical ‘eye’ of the camera as her weapon against social injustice,” curator and editor Roxana Marcoci writes, later citing Frederick Douglass's March 1865, late Civil War speech, "Pictures and Progress," in which "Douglass emphasized that pictures—a form through which humanity externalizes its thoughts and experiences—have the power to undermine racist authority and offset stereotypical portrayals of African Americans. 'Poets, prophets, and reformers are all picture-makers,' he intoned, 'and this ability is the secret of their power and of their achievements. They see what ought to be by the reflection of what is, and endeavor to remove the contradiction.' Frazier wields the power Douglass identified in pictures to alter the moral orientation of a nation, awakening viewers to myriad crises and daring them ‘to remove the contradiction’ between ideals and practice.” continue to blog
“I am not a carbon copy of anyone, just as you are not a composite of your mother, father, grandparents, siblings or extended relatives. The self-portrait you see—the image of your presence—will be the life you live. Part of the root of the world photograph is phōs, which means ‘light’ or ‘to shine.’ It appears also in the ancient Greek word phōsphóros, which means “bearer of light” or “bringer of light.” To photograph means to draw light. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” So begins Monuments of Solidarity, the catalog to LaToya Ruby Frazier’s formidable MoMA survey, collecting more than two decades of her rich, empathetic photographic projects dealing with equity in labor, gender relationships, race, environmental justice and health care, to name just a few of the major issues she tackles head on. “Momme” (2008) is from Frazier’s earliest, breakthrough body of work, The Notion of Family (2001–14)—centered around her collapsed steel-milling hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania, and three generations of African American women including herself, her mother and her grandmother—which she initiated when she was just sixteen years old. continue to blog
FORMAT: Pbk, 9.5 x 12 in. / 256 pgs / 300 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $60.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $86 ISBN: 9781633451599 PUBLISHER: The Museum of Modern Art, New York AVAILABLE: 5/14/2024 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA ONLY
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Edited with text by Roxana Marcoci. Text by Emilie Boone, Carson Chan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, Delphine Sims.
Frazier’s personalized arrangements of her compelling photographs recognize the myriad social and political struggles of Black working-class communities
For more than two decades, artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier has used photography, text, moving images and performance to revive and preserve forgotten narratives of labor, gender and race in the postindustrial era. Frazier has cultivated a practice that builds on the legacy of the social documentary tradition of the 1930s, the photo-conceptual forays of the 1960s and 1970s, and the work of socially conscious writers such as Upton Sinclair, James Baldwin and bell hooks. Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the creativity and collaboration that persist in the face of industrialization and deindustrialization, racial and environmental injustice, gender disparities, unequal access to health care and clean water, and the denial of fundamental human rights. A form of Black feminist world-building, Frazier’s nontraditional “monuments for workers’ thoughts” 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.
Published in conjunction with the first comprehensive museum survey dedicated to the artist, Monuments of Solidarity presents the full range of her practice and includes both rarely seen and brand-new bodies of work. An illuminating overview essay by the exhibition’s curator, Roxana Marcoci, is accompanied by a manifesto by the artist and a suite of focused essays by other curators and scholars.
LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her artistic practice spans a range of mediums, including photography, video, performance, installation art and books, and centers on the nexus of social justice, cultural change and commentary on the American experience. Frazier is the recipient of numerous awards, including a 2015 MacArthur Fellowship.
