LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, formerly worked in New York, and currently lives and works in Chicago. An artist and activist, Frazier uses photography, video, and performance to document personal and social histories of midwestern America.

Having grown up in the shadow of the steel industry, Frazier has chronicled the health and environmental crisis facing her family and her hometown since she was a teenager. Realizing at a young age that media depictions of people like herself did not accurately represent her life, she employs a radical black-and-white documentary approach that captures the complexity, injustice, and simultaneous hope within America. Her 2016 Flint is Family body of work traces the lives of three generations of women living through the water crisis in Flint, Michigan.

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LaToya Ruby Frazier: Intergenerational

Interview

Intergenerational

LaToya Ruby Frazier describes the external factors at play in her work and the rapidly changing socio-economic landscape of her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Access to Healthcare: A Conversation Led by LaToya Ruby Frazier

Deep Focus

Access to Healthcare: A Conversation Led by LaToya Ruby Frazier

by LaToya Ruby Frazier

At Gavin Brown’s enterprise in Harlem, LaToya Ruby Frazier leads a panel discussion with a scholar, a minister, and a doctor on the state of access and equity in healthcare, the history of artists and intellectuals who have fought for these rights in the past, and change-makers who are leading the charge today.

Scenius, Inspiration, and Invention

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Scenius, Inspiration, and Invention

by Todd Elkin

Educator-in-Residence Todd Elkin reflects on the ways in which his classroom embodies the concept of “scenius,” in which creative inventions emerge from social contexts, as the students working near each other riff off one another’s strategies and ideas.

Rust, Decay and Decomposition: Four Artists to Teach With

Teaching with Contemporary Art

Rust, Decay and Decomposition: Four Artists to Teach With

by Joe Fusaro

Art21 Senior Education Advisor Joe Fusaro shares four artists who use rust and decay to tell stories, illuminate histories, and prompt us to think about beauty in new ways.

Gallery

  • Artist at Work

    24 Images