JTF (just the facts): A retrospective exhibition of photographs and videos, installed in a series of seven gallery spaces on the third floor of the museum. Organized by Roxana Marcoci, with Caitlin Ryan and Antoinette D. Roberts.

The following works are included in the exhibition:

Gallery One: The Notion of Family

• 29 gelatin silver prints, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, sized roughly 15×19, 18×23, 18×24, 19×23 (or the reverse), 19×24 (or the reverse), 20×24 (or the reverse), 20×44, 24×32, 30×44, 48×60 inches
• 1 set of 9 gelatin silver prints, 2010, each sized roughly 19×14 inches
• 1 video (color, silent), 2009, 58 seconds
• 1 video (color, silent), 2008, 2 minutes 5 seconds
• 1 video (color, sound), 2010, 3 minutes 28 seconds

Gallery Two: If Everybody’s Work is Equally Important?

• 1 video (color, sound), 2010, 6 minutes 31 seconds
• 1 billboard, paint, and vinyl, 2012, sized 144×144 inches
• 1 set of 12 photolithograph and silkscreen prints, 2011, each sized roughly 16×14 inches
• 1 gelatin silver print, 2011, 20×24 inches
• 2 inkjet prints, 2013, sized roughly 42×63 inches

Gallery Three: Flint is Family in Three Acts

• 1 video (color, sound), 2016, 11 minutes 50 seconds
• 9 gelatin silver prints, 2017-2019, sized 60×48, 30×40, 24×20, 20×24, 14×11, 11×14 inches
• 2 inkjet prints, 2017-2019, sized 40×30, 30×40 inches
• 9 inkjet print and text panel on steel and concrete stand, 2019, sized 30×40 inches

Gallery Four: On the Making of Steel Genesis: Sandra Gould Ford

• 1 vinyl wallpaper, 2017, sized 156×84 inches
• 1 gelatin silver print, 2017, 48×60 inches
• 12 cyanotypes, 2017, sized roughly 24×19, 24×18, 21×19, 19×24, 18×24, 17×21, 11×9, 9×11 inches
• 1 set of 3 cyanotypes, 2017, each sized roughly 11×9 inches
• 1 set of 2 cyanotypes, 2017, each sized roughly 11×9 inches
• (SGF) 5 archival inkjet prints, 1985, 1988, c1989, sized roughly 9×14, 14×20, 16×11, 16×24 inches

Gallery Five: More Than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers of Baltimore, Maryland, 2021-2022

• 1 set of 18 inkjet panels on 9 IV poles, 2022, each panel sized roughly 28×49 inches

Gallery Six: The Last Cruze

• 1 installation with 70 gelatin silver prints, 1 video (color, sound), and steel iron sculptural display system, sized overall roughly 9x71x9 feet

Gallery Seven: A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta: The Forty Acres, Arvin Migratory Labor Camp, Nuestra Señora Reina de la Paz, Dolores Huerta Peace and Justice Cultural Center

• 1 vinyl wallpaper, 2023-2024, sized roughly 8 feet tall
• 21 inkjet prints, 2023-2024, sized 13×19 inches

Loggia: Pier 54: A Human Right to Passage

• 6 vinyl wallpapers, 2014
• 1 sound recording, 1915/2024

A catalog of the exhibition was published in 2024 by the museum (here). Paperback, 12 x 9.5 inches, 256 pages, with 300 color and black-and-white reproductions. Edited by Roxana Marcoci. With contributions by Emilie Boone, Carson Chan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Oluremi C. Onabanjo, and Delphine Sims. (Cover shot below.)

Comments/Context: When a successful mid career artist finally gets his or her first robust museum survey, we can for the first time really step back and look at the arc of a developing artistic career, rather than just its discrete points and incremental bodies of work along the way. Most careers form some kind of forward progression or evolution, but the path isn’t always straightforward and the ideas sometimes take years to actually coalesce into an identifiable artistic point of view. The first survey allows us to pull back from examining the details of the trees to see the entire artistic forest.

Among contemporary photographers, few have taken on the role of collaborating activist as much as LaToya Ruby Frazier. In the past two decades since she began making photographs, Frazier has become a powerful artistic advocate for working-class Americans, expanding the social documentary traditions of Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and W. Eugene Smith to include more contemporary Black and Brown voices and realities. In exploring issues such as the unequal access to healthcare, the deindustrialization of American cities and factories, the lack of safe water to drink, and the overlooked importance of community healthcare workers, among other topics, Frazier has transformed herself into an active and effective witness, investing time and energy in the act of engaged and participative storytelling, which has ultimately led to projects and artistic “monuments” that powerfully communicate her learnings.

The pattern that emerges from observing Frazier’s entire career in one sweep is that it actually divides relatively neatly into two halves: the first decade, where her subjects are personal, including the struggles of her own family and community, and the second decade, where she is a witness to other working-class stories from around the country. And intriguingly, as Frazier has moved farther and farther from the closeness and intimacy of her family, her photographs have taken less aesthetic risk and become more straightforward and documentary. In a sense, as Frazier’s stories have become more arm’s length, she has incrementally muted her own artistic eye, perhaps to make more space for the fuller voices and personalities of her subjects.

The first several rooms of this show chronicle Frazier’s first decade of work, starting with black-and-white images made in her twenties, largely of her mother and grandmother. This three generation portrait (which took shape as the 2014 photobook The Notion of Family, reviewed here) is both tender and unflinching, featuring a number of staged images of mother and daughter. These photographs have aged well, insightfully exploring the tensions and connections in their relationship in setups with one looking at the other, both reflected in a mirror, both sitting on a couch, both standing against a floral comforter, both silhouetted behind a sheet, and the daughter standing in the shadow of the mother. A short video (from 2009) pushes these competing emotions still further, with mother and daughter wrestling and embracing, fighting and loving, in the span of just a few minutes. Frazier’s images of her grandmother are filled with the resonant details of the elderly woman’s modest life: the pictures on her refrigerator, her collection of dolls, her favorite recliner, and the debris on her carpet. The family story then takes a poignant turn as the grandmother ages, eventually leading to a three-way photograph of the mother and daughter at the grandmother’s wake.

Frazier grew up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, and an early image of her grandmother outside the local hospital foreshadows a subject that would come to interest Frazier more fully several years later. In 2011, that same hospital was demolished, leaving local residents without adequate access to health care, and Frazier made images of both the protests against the hospital closure and the textural rubble of the ruins after the bulldozers had done their work. Along with images of the nearby steel works and a rephotographed picture of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, Frazier had clearly begun to look outside the world of her immediate family to examine the many issues facing her local community (which included racism, industrial pollution, and economic decline, leading to the closing of the hospital). When Levi’s then ran an idealized ad campaign featuring Braddock as a “new frontier” for denim-clad “urban pioneers”, Frazier responded with a silent protest performance in front of a Levi’s store in New York, where she rubbed her worker’s outfit raw on the rough concrete of the sidewalk.

At this point in her development as an artist, Frazier started to pile up attention and accolades – a 2014 Guggenheim fellowship and a 2015 MacArthur genius grant in particular – which likely contributed to the broadening of her horizons and the enabling of more ambitious artistic projects. The ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan, became her next major subject, forming a conceptual bridge back to the health care issues she had addressed in her own community. Over four years and a series of three separate artistic “acts”, Frazier stepped outside herself and followed the life of Flint resident Shea Cobb and her extended family and their struggles with the everyday realities of living with tainted water. The black-and-white photographs from the first act are the most similar in style to Frazier’s earlier images, with collaborative portraits with Cobb’s father and daughter (and various video interviews) creating a sense of personal multi-generational engagement. The subsequent sections of the project transition into color, and as more residents enter the picture, grassroots organizing gathers momentum, and an innovative atmospheric water generator ultimately surfaces, Frazier edges back toward documentary clarity, with centered standing portraits, lengthy transcribed statements, and more straightforward visual communication of the situation.

The strongest of Frazier’s recent projects is undoubtedly “The Last Cruze”, which compassionately documents the closure of a General Motors auto factory in Lordstown, Ohio (reviewed as a 2020 photobook here). Over a period of roughly nine months, Frazier traveled to the area and spent time with United Auto Workers union members and their families, making photographs at their homes and at the union hall, and capturing their stories in interviews and conversations. It is a rich and layered story of American industrial decline, but also of the deep commitment, dedication, and humanity of the workers faced with a compromised situation. Frazier’s installation is a triumph, hosting her photographs and text panels on bright orange steel housings, which hang from an overhead support like the rhythmic passing of the factory assembly line; it’s a tight squeeze to get in and engage with each panel, but that unexpected intimacy brings us in closer to the anxious situation, all under the harsh glow of fluorescent lights. While many of Frazier’s photographs again stick to straightforward compositions and portrait subjects, more than a few capture moments of emotion, from tense union meetings and sorrowful departures to proud retirements and jobs well done.

During the pandemic, Frazier turned her attention to the community healthcare workers in Baltimore, Maryland. That effort ultimately took shape as another installation or “monument”, with color portraits and text panels hosted on metal IV poles (2023 gallery show reviewed here). The installation here is roughly half as large as the original, but it still offers a window into both an overlooked aspect of how health care is actually delivered to underserved communities and into Frazier’s continued evolution as a visual storyteller. The collaborative portraits in this project are even more driven by their subjects, and the supporting texts are written as first person narratives, leading to Frazier becoming more of a conduit and champion than ever before, rather than an artistic interpreter. This is even more true of Frazier’s most recent project, celebrating the Chicana workers’ rights activist Dolores Huerta. The photographs of their joint travels are largely modest snapshot-style views of Huerta standing in front of various memorials and other locations, with Frazier documenting Huerta’s presence at these places as a way of re-seeing her contributions to US labor history.

Frazier’s artistic trajectory seems to be pointing her toward a new kind of photographic sociology, where marginalized stories of American race, gender, and labor are surfaced, documented, preserved, and re-communicated; one way this effort has been characterized is as a form of “Black feminist world-building”, but we can also see it as a simpler version of engaged social advocacy. Frazier’s relative artistic celebrity now gives her a societal position where her unique brand of visual advocacy can make even more of a difference, and she has admirably leveraged her stature to amplify the stories of others. As seen here, that focus on the perspectives of the overlooked seems to be diluting Frazier’s own photographic experimentation and risk taking of late, but in cementing her position as one of the 21st century’s most notable visual witnesses, perhaps that sacrifice of style is deliberately making room for more substance.

Collector’s POV: LaToya Ruby Frazier is represented by Gladstone Gallery in New York (here). Frazier’s work has little consistent secondary market presence; in the past few years, prices for her prints have ranged between roughly $3000 and $51000, but the total number of lots available has been relatively small.