Photographer, video artist and Braddock native LaToya Ruby Frazier is one of 24 creative individuals receiving recognition as a 2015 MacArthur Fellow.
Each year, the MacArthur Foundation's annual “genius grants” reward exceptionally creative American scientists, writers, artists, academics and entrepreneurs with a $625,000 grant. The grant is paid out in quarterly installments over five years.
In return, the foundation asks only that the fellows continue to produce good work.
“These 24 delightfully diverse MacArthur Fellows are shedding light and making progress on critical issues, pushing the boundaries of their fields and improving our world in imaginative, unexpected ways,” says MacArthur President Julia Stash. “Their work, their commitment and their creativity inspire us all.”
Frazier, 33, is an assistant professor in the department of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She received a bachelor of fine arts in 2004 from Edinboro University and a master of fine arts in 2007 from Syracuse University.
Her hometown of Braddock serves as a backdrop for her photographs and videos.
The images employ the once-thriving steel-mill town and its African-American community to explore identities of place, race and family through images that are a hybrid of self-portraiture and social narrative.
Her first book, “Notion of Family,” published in 2014, includes a series of stark black-and-white photographs, showing her mother, grandmother and Frazier amid the demographic decline in Braddock.
The portraits underscore the connection between self and physical space and make visible the consequences of neglect and abandonment for Braddock's community of working-class African Americans.
“This work is not solely social documentary,” Frazier says on her website (latoya rubyfrazier.com). “These are psychological portraits of the identity of the body and how surrounding outside space shapes and forms it physically. I view Grandma Ruby, Mom and myself as one entity. There is an intergenerational transference of our identities existing in the history of Braddock, Pa.”
Locally, her work has been shown at the Andy Warhol Museum during the 2011 Pittsburgh Biennial.
Her video installation, “Self Portrait (United States Steel),” based on her youth growing up in the shadow of U.S. Steel's Edgar Thomson plant, was part of the Artists Image Resource's exhibit “Rethinking Pittsburgh's Industrial Legacy” in 2011.
Another of the 2015 MacArthur fellows, choreographer Michelle Dorrance, will be bringing her troupe, Dorrance Dance, to Pittsburgh in April as part of the Pittsburgh Dance Council series.
Alice T. Carter is a staff writer for Trib Total Media. She can be reached at 412-320-7808, acarter@tribweb.com or via Twitter @ATCarter_Trib.
