LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity at the MoMA

From May 12 to September 07, 2024, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) presents “LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity”, the first museum survey dedicated to the artist-activist.

Source: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) · Image: LaToya Ruby Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levi’s, 2010 © 2023 Art21, courtesy of the artist and Gladstone gallery. Image via http://press.moma.org/

For more than two decades, Frazier has used photography, text, moving images, and performance to revive and preserve forgotten narratives of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial era. Bringing together work from 2001 to 2024, this exhibition highlights the full range of Frazier’s practice to date and includes several rarely- and never-before-seen works. LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity is organized by Roxana Marcoci, The David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator, with Antoinette D. Roberts and Caitlin Ryan, Curatorial Assistants, Department of Photography.

Born in 1982 in the steel town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier has cultivated a practice that critically 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 like Upton Sinclair, James Baldwin, and bell hooks. Frazier’s work sheds light on pressing social and political issues, including those spurred by industrialization and deindustrialization, racial and environmental injustice, gender disparities, unequal access to healthcare and potable water, and the erosion or denial of fundamental human rights.

“As a form of Black feminist world-building, these nontraditional monuments 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,” said Marcoci.

“It is incumbent upon me to resist—one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time—historical erasure and amnesia,” Frazier pointed out.