"Our mind sees in images. We have dreams of how we want things to be around us. We need a radical documentary work. It's about questioning things and interrogating things."
LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania. Her artistic practice spans a range of media, including photography, video, performance, installation art and books, and centers on the nexus of social justice, cultural change, and commentary on the American experience. Frazier uses collaborative storytelling with the people who appear in her artwork to address topics of industrialism, Rust Belt revitalization, environmental justice, access to healthcare, access to clean water, Workers’ Rights, Human Rights, family, and communal history. Frazier’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions in the US and Europe, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; 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 Frost Art Museum, Miami; The Musée d’art Moderne, Luxembourg; and The Newcomb Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans. In 2015, her first book The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014) about how her family survived environmental racism in historic steel mill town Braddock Pennsylvania received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award. In 2020, Frazier was named the inaugural recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book prize for her book Flint Is Family In Three Acts about how working-class families survived the man-made water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Her work is held in numerous public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Brooklyn Museum; Whitney Museum; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and many others. Frazier is the recipient of many honors and awards including fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s MacArthur Fellows Program (2015), TED Fellows (2015), and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (2014). LaToya Ruby Frazier is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
