This conversation between artist LaToya Ruby Frazier and Allen and Lola Goldring Curator Margot Norton is hosted in conjunction with the New Museum exhibition ‘Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America’. This public program series highlights the practices of artists participating in this exhibition.
LaToya Ruby Frazier (b. 1982, Braddock, USA) has been the subject of numerous solo presentations of her work and recent exhibitions have included The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Seattle Art Museum, The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; Contemporary Art Museum, Houston; Musée des Arts Contemporains, Grand-Hornu, Belgium; CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France; Carré d’Art – musée d’art contemporain de Nîmes, France; The Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; The August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh; The Frost Art Museum, Miami; The Musée d’art Moderne, Luxembourg; and The Newcomb Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans. In 2020, her work The Last Cruze was the subject of major solo exhibitions at Chicago’s Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago and The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus. A forthcoming catalogue for the exhibition, published by the Renaissance Society, will include contributions by Coco Fusco, David Harvey, Werner Lange, Lynn Nottage, and Benjamin J. Young, as well as extensive documentation. In 2020, Frazier was named the inaugural recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl prize for artists whose practices reflect and extend Gordon Parks’s legacy of using photography as a tool to advance social justice. Frazier will publish a book with Steidl, expected spring of 2021.
Her work is included in celebrated international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, The Seattle Art Museum, The Dallas Museum of Art, The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Princeton Art Museum, The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among many others.
A recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2015, LaToya Ruby Frazier’s artistic practise spans a range of media that incorporates photography, video and performance and centres on the nexus of social justice, cultural change and commentary on the American experience. Citing Gordon Parks as an influence, Frazier uses the camera as a weapon and turns injustice and displacement into a meditation on life, work and history through the powerful act of artistic creation.
