In San Francisco, Wielding Influence (Gently) Through Art

The New York Times
by Ted Loos

“Soft Power” looks at how creativity helps to shape society.

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Shea and Zion drinking a sip of water from their freshwater spring, Jasper County, Newton, Mississippi from the series Flint is Family II, 2017; courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York and Rome

“Soft Power,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through mid-February, epitomizes its era in that it looks self-consciously at the ways in which cultural influence is exerted, with special attention to previously hidden voices.

“The title is a twist on the Reagan-era phrase,” said Eungie Joo, the museum’s curator of contemporary art, who conceived the show.

In the late 1980s, the phrase, coined by Joseph S. Nye Jr., the political scientist, was employed in a foreign policy context. It referred to the ability of the United States to influence countries’ behavior without coercion or force, through cultural institutions, universities, churches, media or other civic means.

For Ms. Joo, it helped her organize her thoughts about “a generation of artists who are concerned with their role in society as citizens and social actors.”

The exhibition features 20 artists, some of whom have done special commissions for it, and it has an international flavor — perhaps ironically, given the title’s original all-American slant. Many of the participants were born outside of the United States or work in other countries.

The roster includes some contributors like the American photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, who have had substantial museum exposure, and others like the Turkish artist Cevdet Erek who may be new to viewers.

The title and concept were especially appealing to the artist Tavares Strachan, who grew up in Nassau in the Bahamas and now lives and works mostly in New York.

“‘Soft power’ is a contradiction in terms,” Mr. Strachan said over the summer, on a brief break from creating new work in his large Chelsea studio. “But yin and yang is a fundamental part of making anything compelling.”

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Courtesy of: The New York Times

Episode No. 412: LaToya Ruby Frazier

The Modern Art Notes Podcast features LaToya Ruby Frazier.

The Modern Art Notes Podcast features LaToya Ruby Frazier
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The Renaissance Society in Chicago is showing “LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze.” The exhibition features a new body of work that focuses on the United Auto Workers members at General Motors’s Lordstown, Ohio plant. The facility, which had produced automobiles for over 50 years, was recently “unallocated” by GM — a term-of-art that indicates the plant has been shut down. Until recently it produced the Chevrolet Cruze. Frazier’s pictures present members of UAW Local 1112, and tell the story of their lives and the community they’ve built in northeastern Ohio. On September 14, the day the exhibition opened in Chicago, the UAW’s current national contract with the Big Three automakers — GM, Ford and Chrysler — ended. The UAW instigate a strike at GM plants. It is already the longest strike against GM since 1970. “The Last Cruze” is on view through December 1. It was curated by Karsten Lund and Solveig Øvstebø.

LaToya Ruby Frazier is a Chicago-based artist whose work most often examines the ways in which corporations have impacted the lives of workers, their families and their communities. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at numerous museums in France, Luxembourg, Belgium, and across the United States. She was the recipient of a 2015 MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant, and has also received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and USA Artists.

Air date: September 26, 2019.

Courtesy of: The Modern Art Notes Podcast

Renaissance Society exhibition shines light on Northeast Ohio working class

Hyde Park Herald
by Aaron Gettinger

Documentary photographer and MacArthur fellow LaToya Ruby Frazier poses within her installation of photographs, The Last Cruze, during its opening reception at The Renaissance Society of The University of Chicago. (Photo by Marc Monaghan)

Two days before 50,000 United Automobile Workers (UAW) members went on strike against General Motors over pay and idled plants, photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier opened “The Last Cruze” at the Renaissance Society, shining a light on the toll GM’s decision to “un-allocate” a plant in Lordstown, Ohio, has taken on union workers and their families.

GM reneged on a promise to make the Chevrolet Cruze, a compact economy car, in Lordstown until 2021. Employees were offered a relocation package outside of Northeast Ohio, forcing workers to choose between continued work and being cut off from their community against losing their pensions and benefits.

Over 60 of Frazier’s photographs are on display in an exhibition designed to look like an automobile manufacturing line. “The Last Cruze” is also meant to recall a cathedral, taking advantage of the Renaissance Society gallery’s vaulted ceilings.

Frazier spent months documenting the workers in their homes and in the UAW Local 1112. Her practice takes cues from Great Depression-era social documentary work and conceptual photography of the 1960s and ’70s. Solveig Øvstebø and Karsten Lund with the Renaissance Society curated.

Frazier, who teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, gave an hour-long discussion on “The Last Cruze” Saturday evening at the Cobb Lecture Hall, pointing out the human impact GM’s decision has caused, decrying cosmopolitan alienation from working people and lambasting the media’s depiction of the working class.

“I need you all to understand that up through yesterday, General Motors has literally been dislocating and moving people from Lordstown away from their family and loved ones — even on Labor Day,” Frazier said. “On Labor Day, I was receiving messages and phone calls from people reporting to their new locations.”

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Courtesy of: Hyde Park Herald

‘No One Was Going to Pay Attention’

ARTnews
by Claire Voon

As GM Auto Workers Strike in Ohio, LaToya Ruby Frazier Debuts Photos of Union Laborers in Chicago

LaToya Ruby Frazier, Mindy Miller standing with fellow Auto Warehouse Company ironworkers and the last Cruze in the GM Lordstown Plant Complex at 2300 Hallock-Young Road (11 years in at AWC), Lordstown OH, from “The Last Cruze,” 2019.

Last November, workers at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, received some fateful news: the automotive company’s chief executive, Mary Barra, had decided to “unallocate” the 53-year-old factory in town, in addition to four others in North America. Through the decision—and the use of vague language—GM would essentially close the plants while avoiding a breach of contract with United Auto Workers, a union that represents 49,000 GM employees. Production of the Lordstown factory’s sole product, the Chevrolet Cruze, was supposed to continue through 2021, but the last one was rolled out in March. Since then, the plant has been inactive, and 1,500 workers have had their lives upended.

The national media has fixated on the Lordstown factory’s shutdown in relation to Donald Trump’s response to it and the ways it could impact the political leanings of Rust Belt voters in the 2020 Presidential election. But one artist is determined to tell a different story—that of the largely unreported narrative of individual lives put on hold by a decision that left so many alone and out of work.

On a frigid afternoon last March, LaToya Ruby Frazier was taking photographs some 1,500 feet in the air above the Lordstown General Motors complex. Strapped into a helicopter, she carefully trained her heavy 600-millimeter lens on her mark below: a white Chevrolet Cruze surrounded by workers from the Auto Warehousing Company waving signs. The largest of the signs, dense with signatures, read in bold letters, “THE LAST CRUZE.”

“When I saw the news, I was moved because I understood the calamity that this was going to create,” Frazier told ARTnews months later. “I knew they were going to reduce these workers to statistics based on shares and stocks, and no one was going to pay attention to their livelihood.”

It was a calamity she had been tracking in real time. Shortly after the news about the factory was first announced, Frazier reached out to the New York Times to ask if she could partner with its newsroom to cover the developing story. Two months later, she sat outside a Lordstown union hall, waiting while members of UAW Local 1112 voted to allow her in, with her camera in tow. The decision in her favor was unanimous.

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Courtesy of: ARTnews

LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze: Lost Labor

FAD Magazine
by Caira Moreira-Brown

Visual artist, LaToya Ruby Frazier showcases her collaborative storytelling with the people who appear in her photographs, videos, texts, interviews, and performances in her latest exhibition, The Last Cruze at The Renaissance Society in Chicago, IL.

The Last Cruze zooms in on Lordstown, Ohio and the automotive union there. Fraizer focuses on the United Auto Workers Local 1112, and through this lens sheds a light on the economic crisis that the workers and their families are currently enduring.

Dan Morgan, Local 1112 Shop Chairman, in his office at UAW Local 1112 Reuther, Scandy, Alli union hall (25 years in at GM Lordstown Assembly, trim shop), Lordstown OH
PHOTOS: COURTESY OF LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER AND GAVIN BROWN’S ENTERPRISE NEW YORK/ROME

In The Last Cruze reveals the corporate culture of profits over people and the destruction of families and an entire community, in the deeper context, she explores the dynamics of unions and their pitfalls.

Her work also addresses trauma through creating a foundation her practice to fully understand the historical and political moments of our generation, the viewer develops an understanding of how corruption against people of color leading up to now has written the layout for our American culture and society.

The Last Cruze introduces an important moment in Frazier’s examination of work, family, and social circles.

She creates a platform representing social justice through her photographic lens. We are able to take a deeper look through visual representation into the working-class families. This need for investigation originates from her commitment to being apart of the expanding histories of 1930s social documentation and to create a platform relevant to 1960s and 70s conceptual photographic practices that sermonize urgent daily social and political issues.

Not by accident today, the opening of The Last Cruze falls on the same date that current UAW contract with GM expires. While the current stay of these union workers in Cruze’s work has an unknown path ahead of them her lens and vision call attention to documentary photographic is a beautiful, raw, and defiant moment.

The Last Cruze, contrary to the title allows the viewer to know that this is not the end but just the beginning and like social documentary photograph there will be more images ahead.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: The Last Cruze
Sept. 14 through Dec. 1, 2019
Renaissance Society, University of Chicago.
renaissancesociety.org

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Courtesy of: FAD Magazine

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s Labor of Love

The photographer’s first Chicago solo show centers on workers at a beleaguered GM factory in Ohio.

Chicago Magazine
by Jake Malooey

Photo: Nolis Anderson

Last November, LaToya Ruby Frazier got wind of the kind of news she finds both troubling and creatively motivating. General Motors was planning to close five North American plants in the coming year. The first would be in Lordstown, Ohio, where the since-discontinued Chevrolet Cruze was made. Thousands of workers there would be either out of a job or forced to relocate.

“I was thinking about how that many workers being laid off or made to move so far from their aging parents and children was going to have a catastrophic domino effect,” Frazier says. It was a familiar story for the 37-year-old photographer. Though she has lived here since 2014, when she took an associate professorship at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, her true home and artistic wellspring is Braddock, Pennsylvania, a steel mill town outside Pittsburgh that the state has categorized for three decades as “financially distressed.”

United Auto Workers and their families holding up Drive It Home campaign signs outside UAW Local 1112 Reuther, Scandy, Alli union hall, Lordstown OH.
Photos: Courtesy of LaToya Ruby Frazier and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise New York/Rome

“You can’t be from Braddock and not make the human connection when you hear of a factory closure,” she says. “That’s in my DNA. I wanted to be there for the workers in Lordstown at that difficult time and be a witness and a champion and an advocate to them, their stories, and their perspectives.” Those images are the subject of her first-ever Chicago solo show, The Last Cruze, at the Renaissance Society.

In recent years, Frazier has emerged as one of the most incisive American artists of her generation, directly addressing the precariousness of the working class. For her 2014 book, The Notion of Family — which helped lead the MacArthur Foundation to award her with a “genius” grant — she trained her lens for 14 years on herself, her hometown, and her family. Her subjects included her grandmother’s stepfather, Gramps, whose body Frazier observed breaking down from age and decades of labor in Braddock’s Edgar Thomson Steel Works, Andrew Carnegie’s first mill. In the 2016 series Flint Is Family, she devoted six months to the aftermath of that city’s water crisis, particularly how it affected three generations of black women from a single family (the project is still ongoing).

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Courtesy of: Chicago Magazine