Art as Activism with Latoya Ruby Frazier
LaToya Ruby Frazier is a multidisciplinary artist whose work ranges from photography, video, performance, installation art, and books focused on themes of social justice, acculturation, and the reality of the American experience. Latoya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982, in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Today the town’s defining feature is itself a remnant of an outdated industry — Andrew Carnegie’s steel mill. Braddock lost its importance with the collapse of the steel industry in the United States in 1970s and 80s, coinciding with the crack cocaine epidemic of the early 1980s, and the combination of the two nearly destroyed the community of Braddock.
Frazier works on numerous social impacts to spread awareness towards the different issues our country and world faces today including worker’s rights, human rights, access to clean water, and environmental justice.
LaToya Ruby Frazier brings forth a personal narrative towards her social activism. Her work is intimate and raw; it shows the realities of oppression in the communities that suffer. In 2015, her first book, The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014) was an account of how her mother and grandmother survived through environmental racism in their steel mill town in Pennsylvania. Much of LaToya’s work calls upon action for us to organize and revolutionize against the atrocities we as a country are put through due to a select personnel’s greed and disregard for human rights.
“A marriage of art and activism, the artist’s searing photographs reveal the human toll of economic injustice.” — The New York Times
The Last Cruze, sets out to amplify the voices of auto workers in Lordstown, Ohio, as the General Motors plant halted production, displacing workers. Her work investigates labor, family, community, and the working class. After more than 50 years of automobile production, the facility was recently unallocated by GM, as the company shifts its focus toward overseas production. For many this meant instability and uprooting of families and their respective community.
Frazier first travelled to Flint in 2016 to create a photo essay about the community’s water crisis. There, she met Shea Cobb, a poet, activist, and mother from Flint. Together they worked for five years on this body of work following Cobb as she fights for her family’s and community’s health and rights.
In Pier 54: A Human Right to Passage, Frazier pays homage to her predecessors, documentary photographers of the late 19th century in which she shares the desire to comment on social, political, and economic conditions. In this series she brings her camera to her hometown Braddock, Pennsylvania and captures the community in its economic crisis that has ensued since the collapse of its steel industry in the 1970’s. She brings forth issues of class, race, health care, and environmental ruin.
