LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s artistic practice spans a range of media that incorporates photography, video and performance and centers 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. 

LaToya Ruby Frazier was born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania and has been the subject of numerous solo presentations at the Brooklyn Museum; Seattle Art Museum; Institute of Contemporary Art, 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; Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh; Frost Art Museum, Miami; Musée d’art Moderne, Luxembourg; and the Newcomb Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans.  

Her work is included in celebrated international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Studio Museum, Harlem; Brooklyn Museum; Bronx Museum of Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Baltimore Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, Los Angeles; Seattle Art Museum; Dallas Museum of Art; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, NC; Princeton Art Museum; The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among many others. She was the recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2015 and 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.

Work in the Exhibition: 

LaToya Ruby Frazier, FLINT 1,462 days and counting man-made water crisis, 2018. Nylon flag, dimensions variable. Presented as part of Creative Time’s Pledges of Allegiance, 2017 - 2018. Courtesy the artist and Creative Time, New York. Photo by Guillaume Ziccarelli.