Artist Lecture: LaToya Ruby Frazier

This February, artist and activist LaToya Ruby Frazier will visit Dartmouth College to present her lecture, "Arts as Transformation, Using Photography for Social Change."

Frazier's work in photography, video and performance examine issues at the intersections of of race, class, gender, environmental justice, family and communal history. Taking from her own life and the history of her family, Frazier directs her gaze to communities most effected by postindustrial decline, and the people who inhabit these communities. Her first book of photography, The Notion of Family (2014), catalogs the legacy of her hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania and its relationship to the rise and fall of the American steel industry. Photographs in this body of work include her mother, grandmother and the artist herself. The Notion of Family received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award in 2015, and was recently named as one of "100 Works of Art that Defined the Decade" on a list composed by art critic Ben Davis for ARTnet News. "The series is notable for the way that it combines the directness of black-and-white social documentary with a wrenchingly personal approach, returning again and again to the artist herself...[t]here's just an overwhelming heaviness to The Notion of Family, everyone pinned still as if trapped" writes Davis. 

One of Frazier's most recent projects is a photo essay titled, "Flint is Family." The vision for this project has transformed from an artistic account of time and place, into a growing initiative to supply clean drinking water to the people of Flint, Michigan. You can learn more about these efforts here.

LaToya Ruby Frazier will give her lecture at the Loew Auditorium in the Black Family Visual Arts Center at 6:00pm on Wednesday, February 5th, 2020.  She is a 2015 MacArthur Fellow and an Associate Professor of photography at the School of Art Institute of Chicago.