Saturday afternoons are the worst at MoMA. Every resident and visitor in New York finds themselves at the museum, and you can’t see much art, rather a diverse sea of heads and a pretty decent shoe selection. But as I entered Monuments Of Solidarity on a Saturday afternoon – LaToya Ruby Frazier’s solo show running in the Summer of 2024 – the crowd dissolves, the air is fresher, and suddenly, it is quiet. I am in an alternate space.
The exhibition hall and a luminescent corridor with comfortable benches and floor-to-ceiling windows offering a view of New York sit side by side. The latter is more tempting, yet I advise you to enter the hall. Prepare accordingly for a mix of tender, expressive intimacy and unapologetic advocacy.
The soft pink walls welcome the visitor into the space, dedicated to the artist’s roots. In the opening piece, Ruby Frazier is merging with her mother, approaching the viewer at a proximity, reminiscent of the memory albums (fig.1). The subjects gaze right at the audience in all but one image - LaToya and her Mother distressed and feeling blue on the couch, not interacting. The photo is both the least real and least posed out, as the shot is clearly curated, yet, unlike her other images, tries to appear casual. This image is the first step of the escalation of personal and public tragedy that the viewer follows for the next couple hours.
Facing the entrance is a wall that does not awaken concern until one steps closer to read the scattered words. Cyanides. Benzene. Xylenes. And more. The poem introduces every chemical in the air of Braddock, Pennsylvania – an industrial town that Ruby Frazier considers a family member, establishing the status through the industrial landscapes of decay and her nude against them.
The viewers are drawn into the family hall, thinking they are about to spy on intimacy, but the intimacy is presented voyeuristically: with no discreteness or shame. I am looked back at from every photo, and if not, the vulnerability I am offered is so jarring that I am tempted to look away. No men are in the family, except for Mr. Art – a mysterious gentleman, brought to the forefront, yet out of focus on one of the mother’s portraits. The world that LaToya offers is a space for the muted and powerless to defy their status as such.
Soon, the intimacy is over. A bright red catches the eye in the door opening into the next hall. “Who gets to go forth” states the work — no question mark. Right under it is a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., encouraging people not to believe advertising.
The small hall is painted gray. The room is filled with portrayals of industrial blight. On one wall, a hospital is being torn down; two large-scale photographs, parallel to the floor are printed in color, yet still seem to be monochrome, as the pictured landscape of Braddock offers little in terms of palette.
Ruby Frazier takes a personal and diligent approach to address the mistreatment of Braddock by Levi Strauss & Co. – using the town as a backdrop for a marketing campaign that celebrates the working class, while concealing and disregarding the struggle of the residents, caused by the hospital closure. “Everybody’s work is equally important,” says the campaign selling jackets for 200 dollars apiece. Ruby Frazier mocks the hypocrisy and makes some witty and tragically truthful corrections to the campaign. Go forth where? – she asks.
Nearby, a piece of recorded performance art is playing. In the recording she crawls and squirms against the asphalt outside of the Levi’s pop-up in a pair of their jeans, breaking them down. The hall presents Ruby Frazier as a protester and an artist with aces up her sleeve, ready to shock to win the fight.
From here on, Ruby Frazier goes silent. Ahead is a maze of small-scale billboards, where the voices of residents of Flint, Michigan sound instead: earnest photo portraits in companionship with their stories of living through one of the worst water crises in America (fig. 2). Wandering from one narrative to another, the viewer becomes a reader. The portraits are captivating, yet, somehow, secondary.
Large prints are placed against the sage green walls with scenes that are progressively filled with meaning and foreshadowed, as one goes through the series of personal narratives. Yet, some of them appear detached – reading turns into searching for the meaning behind the images of horse ranches and farms.
It is at this moment that the viewer remembers that they’re standing in the MoMA, a large modernist building on 53rd street in midtown, the wealthiest neighborhood of one of the richest cities in the world. The viewer begins to miss the skylight and view of the city – the contemporary distractions that allow one to abstract from reality itself. Ruby Frazier brings America to the heart of itself, where visitors are unaware and, perhaps, uncomfortable with the present of the country they live in. She utilizes the space given to her to yield the floor, performing an artistic and honorable act of visibility redistribution.
One such act is the next room: oval, with the light ever-changing from red to redder. A portrait of Sandra Gould Ford – an artist and a steelworker - is towering in the middle, and the viewer is invited to circumambulate it clockwise as if a deity in a Hindu shrine. Light keeps changing, making it hard to focus on the textual and schematic evidence of the hell on Earth that is the steel industry in America. The lighting itself, however, is a manifesto of that struggle along with the grim photographs, depicting otherworldly factories, burning up in the toxic heat.
The following storytelling spaces are dedicated to COVID-19 and the General Motors workers union. Whether it is the abundance of text, the cramped space, the distressing yellow wall color, or the direct passageway between the entrance into the hall and the exit from it into the next space or, perhaps, the false notion that Covid is an issue I am well-informed on, it is imminently hard to force myself to stay for long enough to read more than two narratives. The showing of the stories is noble, but overwhelming, thus, ineffective, inciting guilt for the lack of attention into the reader.
The work on the union is a vast red installation – a row of metal stands, spreading across the biggest room so far. The visual is exciting and promising, having a great effect of contrast with the big body of words in small font, encountered previously (fig. 3). Up close, the stands are serving as a backdrop for more text as well as portraits. I am defeated, as my attention span and stamina cannot accommodate the information that LaToya Ruby Frazier is eager to share. The stories, however, agree and argue rivetingly, spotlighting American labor history from every angle.
For Ruby Frazier, the history is made not in presidencies or international politics, but in local crises, dealt with by the working people of America. A message so simple still appears fairly radical for a culturally elite institution. Through organizing this show MoMA allows for the critique of its own ivory tower, perhaps, performing (and inviting the visitors to perform) a set of “moves to innocence”, placing this exhibition as a substitute for action and a forestalling of criticism.
I exit through the previously spotted tempting corridor. I realize, the choice I made, in the beginning, was an illusion of one: the alternative to seeing the show was to see it backwards. Along its walls is one of the strongest works of the day – prints, scaled to match the wall, with the artist holding flags with images that reflect New York’s history of crude immigration policies. Solidarity Forever, covered by Ruby Frazier, is playing. The artwork is a closure – the last piece of the show. The only regret is its placement as a bypass my way out, and not at a more chronologically and spatially central place inside of the exhibit.
Despite the overwhelmingly journalistic feeling of the exhibit, LaToya Ruby Frazier, do not be mistaken, proves in full measure the “artist” part of her title as well as the “activist” in this show. Her portrait photography is raw and brilliantly piercing. The landscape she chooses is not canonically beautiful but tells the history of American labor unlike any other. Ruby Frazier sees value in objects and faces that are disregarded and ostracized, admiring their originative potential, rather than the aesthetics of decay. I wish only that the survey had left just another morsel of its space to appreciate the art as well.
If you read its promise carefully, the exhibition is exactly what it claims to be. It’s not a museum exhibit, but an alternate space: Ruby Frazier offers a survey, dedicated to artist-activists, and as long as you are not hoping to encounter bodies of symbolism and abstract commentary, the promise is kept. She interrogates the historical and present state of American labor, and in doing so, does justice to her community with her MoMA allocated space.
2025