Cleveland.com
By Steven Litt

PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania — It’s big, it’s sprawling, it’s relentless, and at times, it’s vexing, gross, disturbing, and tiresome in the often anti-American politics espoused by its artists.

Forget all of that. Go and see the 58th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art. The show’s flaws and shortcomings are more than made up for through the sheer exhilarating sweep of the work on view, the breadth of viewpoints on display, and the underlying decency of its humanitarian spirit.

Established in 1895 by industrial tycoon Andrew Carnegie, the museum aimed to put Pittsburgh on the map for global art as well as steel. Carnegie conceived the international, inaugurated in 1896, as an annual survey from which the museum would acquire works and build its collection.

Held every three to five years since 1982, the show is North America’s longest-running exhibition of international contemporary art.

This year’s iteration, the first since 2018, is titled “Is it Morning for You Yet?’’ — a clever way to convey the idea of a de-centered globe in which all perspectives are fundamentally local.

Organized by a team led by Sohrab Mohebbi, a native of Iran named last year as director of the SculptureCenter in New York, the show surveys work by more than 100 artists from around the world. A precise count is tricky because the exhibition includes large batches of work from several collectives and overseas collections, each of which constitutes an exhibition within the exhibition. It’s like a geode cracked open with facets within facets.
These internal shows include a collection of Iranian art produced by artists working under the country’s repressive Islamic regime and selections from a museum of modern and contemporary Chilean art launched in 1971 when Salvador Allende was elected as the country’s first Socialist president.

The big ideas

The main thrust of this year’s International is to dethrone the United States and Europe as epicenters of culture and to elevate and promote viewpoints from countries adversely affected by American power, or by global power in general.

Overall, the mood is somber and grim, especially in the show’s major site-specific installations, all commissioned for the exhibition.
[…]

Sense of place

Critics have noted that the International has little to do with Pittsburgh and the surrounding region. Despite its global scope, it doesn’t bring its viewpoint back home to show how the trends it explores relate to the U.S.

The one outstanding exception is an installation by Chicago-based photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier, a native of the industrial Pittsburgh suburb of Braddock, located just upstream along the Monongahela River.

Commissioned by the International, Frazier made a “monument’’ in 2021 consisting of photographic portraits and transcribed interviews depicting community health workers, clergy, and doctors in Baltimore who performed outreach services across the city during a critical phase in the COVID-19 pandemic.

Produced in collaboration with Frazier’s subjects, the photographs are pervaded by compassion for essential workers on the front lines. The accompanying interviews give the installation weight and personal impact.

Alas, the vast amount of text in the accompanying interviews makes it difficult to grasp the work in its entirety within a two- or even three-hour visit, given the enormous amount of art on display throughout the show. Frazier’s piece should be published as a book.

Given its heft, It’s no surprise that the installation earned Frazier the Carnegie Prize, the show’s top award. Her work links the global and the local, giving the 58th International a rock-solid point of connection between the show’s broader themes and an American community similar to Pittsburgh.

It’s a shame there isn’t more work like it in the exhibition. The International’s vast scope is thrilling. It would have benefited from having just a bit more of a sense of place to anchor it more firmly in the community that’s hosting it.

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Courtesy of: Cleveland.com

Smithsonian Magazine
By Shantay Robinson

Explore the enduring bonds and intimacies of modern love at the National Portrait Gallery

In the self-portrait, the artist is holding their baby behind a screen door; in their eyes is a look of intense love, and their tender embrace of the child is deeply moving. The 2018 photograph by Jess T. Dugan, titled Self-portrait with Elinor (screen), depicts the typical adoration of a parent for a child, but the image is especially profound because Dugan is gender nonbinary, and their partner is a cisgender woman.

“In my practice, I’ve always fused a classical style of photographing with a very contemporary subject matter,” Dugan says. “And that’s a strategy I use to bring attention to queerness and different kinds of identity when thinking about sexuality.” Dugan’s art is among more than 40 stunning works on view in the new exhibition “Kinship,” now on view at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

The paintings and images in the show embrace new approaches to portraiture, once a genre of art reserved for the wealthy. And these time-defying photographic series and unconventional painted portraits of those near and dear also demonstrate how the notion of family is changing.

“I think there is this accessibility of the camera that makes for this democratization,” says Leslie Ureña, curator of photographs at the museum. “These artists are taking the medium that can at once seem accessible, but they are making fine art projects that can also trace histories through their works.”

[…]

LaToya Ruby Frazier, who received the MacArthur Fellowship in 2015, found a kindred spirit while producing a photographic essay of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis for Elle magazine.

In 2014, city officials made the decision to switch the town’s water supply from a treated source to a non-treated cheaper alternative, exposing the people of Flint to a staggering increase in the amount of lead in their water. An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease, a severe form of pneumonia, coincided with the water crisis. Today, the water is deemed safe after hundreds of millions of dollars spent repairing the town’s infrastructure, but residents continue to mistrust the water supply, with many refusing to drink from the tap.

Family doesn’t simply stop at the blood line, it expands throughout culture and society as you meet people.

— LaToya Ruby Frazier

While covering this crisis, Frazier met Flint resident Shea Cobb, a poet and activist. The two formed a deep bond as Black women with a working-class background and a deep commitment to resisting environmental contamination—Frazier describes the relationship as “kindred spirits in two bodies.”

The black-and-white images in this series are observant of how life continues even as environmental disasters infringe on daily activities. Images of the subjects going about their normal routines despite not having basic needs showcase the people of Flint’s incredible endurance.

In one photo, Cobb pours water from a store-bought plastic bottle into her daughter’s mouth, so she can brush her teeth. The image captures the split second when the water flows from the bottle, just before it lands in the young girl’s mouth.

“Flint Is Family In Three Acts,” “The Lams of Ludlow Street” and other photographic series in the show demonstrate the many years these photographers have spent with their subjects, chronicling the extent to which they have become kin. “You can track time in a different way through their projects, through the camera and through their photographs,” Urena argues.

[…]

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Courtesy of: Smithsonian Magazine

Andscape
By Lonnae O’Neal

Artists offer a counterbalance to mainstream conceptions of family

Kinship, a new exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, explores the complexities of how people connect. And much like the notion of kinship itself, familial or fictive or forged, what we find are multilayered stories of togetherness.

The exhibit is the latest in a series looking at new conceptions of portraiture. Curators brought together the work of eight artists working on iterations of family in painting, photo, sculpture, video and performance.

Those explorations raised issues of inequities and environmental degradation in Black communities and violence against Indigenous people. They offered counterbalances to mainstream conceptions of family. They anchored themselves in the ways we choose family, “not just the legal and blood relations established by law,” said Leslie Ureña, curator of photographs.

The artists explored how relationships become undone and re-formed, and affinities for strangers who reminded them of themselves, Ureña said. They were looking beyond death, for ways to “keep in touch, more or less, with people who have passed.”

[…]

The series Flint is Family in Three Acts by LaToya Ruby Frazier, whose work documents social justice and cultural change, was initially supposed to be a five-month assignment covering the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. It turned into a five-year collaboration with the family she photographed. Her work compels us to understand how the people behind the industries that gave rise to the American century bear the hazards they bequeathed.

Frazier photographed school bus driver and poet Shea Cobb pouring bottled water like a waterfall into her 8-year-old daughter Zion’s mouth so she could brush her teeth. In capturing the lowlight image, Frazier said, “I freeze it just before the water drop hits her tongue to point out to you as the viewer that in the midst of a crisis, she is choosing the lesser of evils here, which is plastic water bottles which is contaminated with plastic cause they sit on pallets in the heat all day before they’re distributed to residents.”

The beauty of this is as a mother, she’s telling her jokes and singing songs because she’s concerned about her daughter’s relationship with water.

Self-Portrait with Shea and Her Daughter, Zion, in the Bedroom Mirror is set in Mississippi, where Cobb’s father has 90 acres of land along with their own freshwater spring, part of an inheritance of resilience. Cobb looks into the mirror with family photos arrayed around her, and her image is visible in the mirror Zion is looking into, as is the image of Frazier herself. “I’m careful about the legacy of Black women and how we’ve been behind each other generation after generation, regardless of how this country continues to put these types of pitfalls in our way,” Frazier said.

Frazier said she viewed Zion “as a double portrait because I was 8 years old when our water was contaminated in Braddock, Pennsylvania. So I’m also a survivor of these types of systemic and structural environmental justice issues.”

“I knew what it was like to be 8 years old and living in a postindustrial economy, a postindustrial landscape of nothing but contamination, and racism in the health care system. And knowing I couldn’t do anything for myself when I was 8. But here I can stand up for this young girl and her mother today and advocate through the photographs, through the telling of the story. But most of all, I created this family album for Zion,” said Frazier.

[…]

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Courtesy of: Andscape