LaToya Ruby Frazier is a visual artist known for collaborative storytelling with the people who appear in her photographs, videos, texts, and performances. Her use of the photograph as a platform for social justice and visual representation for working-class families is rooted in her commitment to expose the violation of basic human rights and promote environmental justice, access to healthcare, education, employment, and migration and immigration equity. Her photographs often become a source of empowerment that leads to creative solutions.
Her well-known bodies of work include; The Notion of Family, three generations of women in Frazier’s own family, including herself, surviving environmental racism and healthcare inequality in steel mill town, Braddock Pennsylvania, Flint Is Family, portraits of three generations of women surviving the man-made water crisis in Flint Michigan, and, And From The Coaltips A Tree Will Rise, coalminers’ reflections on their memories of migration, immigration, work and labor in coalmining village, Borinage Belgium.
Frazier's newest work, The Last Cruze, is a monument and memorial comprised of 67 photographs and texts on an assembly line for auto workers from the historic labor union United Auto Workers Local 1112 in Lordstown, Ohio. Frazier documented the unallocated status and closure of the General Motors Lordstown Complex in northeast Ohio and the impact on autoworkers, their families and the community.
Frazier is an associate professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is a 2015 MacArthur "Genius Grant Fellow," a 2016 Gordon Parks Foundation Award recipient for her contribution to photography and visual arts. LaToya Ruby Frazier is represented by Gavin Brown's enterprise in New York City and Rome.
