Woman of Steel

In the second of seven gallery rooms, visual artist LaToya Ruby Frazier displayed the thesis behind her first survey, Monuments of Solidarity, recently on view at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Against gray walls the color of hazy smog, Frazier deconstructed Levi’s 2012 “Go Forth” campaign. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Levi’s shot parts of the advertisement campaign in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier’s hometown. Braddock’s history as a steel town in the rust belt fit the brand’s Americana image and was chosen to help sell their famous 501 jeans during a recession. Around the same time, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center closed the Braddock Hospital, a major local employer and care provider. How could Braddock’s mayor let a major corporation idealize blue-collar communities for profit while pulling critical resources from Braddock’s real working class? Frazier responded to the hypocrisy with the collection If Everybody’s Work is Equally Important?, comprising performances, silk-screened prints, aerial photographs, and cyanotype prints.

If Everybody’s Work is Equally Important? presents Frazier’s range of interests and techniques. The six-minute video LaToya Ruby Frazier Takes on Levi’s shows the photographer dragging her body along the streets of SoHo in front of a temporary public photo studio that Levi’s opened in 2010 for the campaign. Twelve silkscreened and photolithographed prints dissect Levi’s portrayal of Braddock, which conflicted with Frazier’s reality. On one a print resembling a classified ad, Frazier underlines a notice about a community center created in 2010 and writes “privately owned.” In this piece, Frazier points out how the Levi’s campaign misrepresented projects such as these, which did not illustrate good will or opportunity in Braddock as the ad suggested, but privatization, gentrification, and divestment.

Elsewhere in the show, Frazier’s project The Notion of Family connected the ailing black bodies of her family with the pollution and disinvestment in her hometown. Portraits featured Grandma Ruby, her guardian; Frazier’s mom, Cynthia; and Frazier herself inside their homes and around Braddock. Mother and daughter transition from hugging to grappling within seconds in the video Momme (Wrestle). There’s affection and distance in this piece and in Mom Making an Image of Me, where Ruby stares with wide, glassy eyes at her mother, who withholds expression. This family is unlike the idyllic Huxtables of The Cosby Show, who we see emblazoned on Ruby’s shirt in another photo.

The distance between them seems partly a result of the illnesses all three women faced at various points. Grandma Ruby Wiping Gramps shows the elder Ruby taking care of her ailing husband, six years before Frazier’s namesake died herself from pancreatic cancer in 2009. Cynthia, meanwhile, suffered from seizures, and her epilepsy test features in the diptych Landscape of the Body (Epilepsy Test), which juxtaposes the lines of the electroencephalogram with fallen electrical lines at the demolished Braddock Hospital. In Self Portrait (United States Steel), Frazier’s topless body appears next to footage of steel plants releasing thick exhaust plumes into the skies. In these pieces, Frazier again sets the foundation of her argument: corporate greed tears apart working-class midwestern families like hers, contributing to ecological disasters and public health crises.

She teases out these costs in another postindustrial city in Flint is Family in Three Acts. Elle magazine commissioned Act 1 of the series in 2016. For a few months, Frazier followed the Cobb family, taking photos to pair with a reported feature about the family’s experiences in Flint. Matriarch Shea Cobb had to decide how to protect her daughter from the lead leeching into Flint’s water supply. When Frazier met her, Shea was brushing her daughter Zion’s teeth with bottled water. This moment appears as a still in the Act 1 video Flint is Family. But Frazier also highlights how the family thrives and resists cleavage despite the circumstances.

Still, the Cobbs ultimately reverse-migrated to Mississippi in search of cleaner water. Along the walls, Frazier’s enlarged photographs showed Zion drinking fresh spring water from the Mississippi River with her grandfather and riding Tennessee Walking Horses within their family-owned land. The move’s symbolism did not escape Frazier. During the antebellum era, Mississippi produced most of the nation’s cotton. In the twentieth century, threats of violence and brutality caused masses of African Americans to flee to cities like Detroit and Flint during the Great Migration. Now, Zion’s inheritance will include the same breed of horse that overseers used on plantations.

Ownership continues as a theme in Act III of Flint is Family, which Frazier displayed on posts set throughout the gallery. Families in Flint pose in front of the atmospheric water generator that Frazier, Cobb, and community organizer Amber Hasan purchased and set up on the Cobb’s land. As in Braddock, the government of Flint failed the needs of working-class neighborhoods. But, this time, Frazier’s art and resources were able to help the Cobb family return to their community in Flint. 

For Frazier, ownership for the working class is an ethical, intellectual, and practical concern. When working on her Elle commission, she advocated for the article’s expansion, wanting to include Flint residents’ perspectives in the project. In an interview for the Gordon Parks HBO documentary A Choice of Weapons, Frazier shared that she always collaborates with the families she photographs, including their voices and desires in the project. This could mean inviting Cobb to narrate the Flint is Family video, or sharing the profits from museum acquisitions with the communities who become her subjects. With each project, Frazier tries to leave communities stronger than when she arrived.

Fittingly, Frazier’s exhibition prioritized workers’ stories over viewers’ experience. At many points in the show, workers detailed their jobs through text, audio, and video. Frazier kept interviews long in collections like On the Making of Steel Genesis, More than Conquerors, and A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta. Interviewers ramble, make prolonged sidebar comments, and take up as much physical space as needed. Although Frazier condensed the interviews for fluency and clarity, she avoids over-editorializing, the way an ethnographer or anthropologist might conduct an oral history. In the recorded interview for On the Making of Steel Genesis, Frazier left in in the pauses, ums, and repetitions of artist and steelworker Sandra Gould Ford as she talks about photographing and documenting workers at a steel plant in Pittsburgh.

Throughout the exhibition, Frazier’s work was arranged in increasingly assertive configurations. Works came off the walls, mounted on structures that filled the gallery floor. Viewers peered down at aerial shots of the Edgar Thomson Plant in Braddock, while freestanding posts held photographs across the exhibit. These insertions encouraged viewers to linger and actively decide how to process what were, at times, excessive blocks of text. With eight rooms, six of which included significant amounts of text, the exhibition could become overwhelming.

Language abounds in More than Conquerors: A Monument for Community Health Workers in Baltimore. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Frazier interviewed health care workers and took portraits of them at the locations of their choosing. In the gallery, eighteen IV poles, spaced six feet apart in a nod to social distancing guidelines, were affixed with these portraits and the accompanying interviews. There was barely enough room to navigate in the cramped space, and Frazier has said that she edited the interviews so that they each require fifteen minutes to read, making it doubtful that an attendee could devote the full five hours it would take to read every community health worker’s testimony. That impossibility is part of the point: the text and faces in this room symbolized the number of patients a doctor or community health worker might see in a single day. Still, there were too many stories for the room, and the exhibition, to hold comfortably.

MoMA itself may not be capacious enough to hold worker’s stories or represent their positions. For Frazier’s goals to be realized and the exhibition read as a history from below, the museum would have to exist on an equal playing field with the working-class communities being exhibited within its walls.

In The Last Cruze, Frazier documents protests by the United Auto Workers Locals 1112 and 1714 to stop the Lordstown, Ohio, General Motors assembly plant from closing in 2018. Frazier represented this fight through profiles and testimonies from union members in an installation that mimics a seventy-foot assembly line. Throughout, union members share how GM’s strength, reputation, and quality come from its workers—not corporate executives. Alison Green, daughter of former Local 1112 president David Green, talks about saluting workers when she passes a plant as if they’re active-duty servicemen. RaNeal Edwards, a veteran, speaks about “dignity and respect” being part of the plant’s ethos and worth ethic.

The irony is that dignity and respect for labor are lacking at MoMA, an institution that denies the fact that art making requires workers. Many capitalists and leaders in the art industry promote the falsehood that arts and humanities careers should be fueled exclusively by passion and investment in a collective good, or a belief in some mystical higher purpose, rather than by a living wage. However, as writer and labor organizer Dana Kopel writes for Momus, “Art work is work,” and its value increases the wealth of collectors, dealers, and directors at the expense of museum workers, staff, and artists—including at the museum where Frazier’s show was just on view.

During the acute phase of the pandemic, MoMA faced backlash about its labor practices. After the museum temporarily closed, it fired longtime freelancers within the education department via email in April 2020. Maintenance workers with Local 30 of the International Union of Operating Engineers accepted a deal that meant giving up contractually guaranteed salary raises for two years in exchange for not being laid off or terminated, a sacrifice they felt the museum did not acknowledge in good faith when they began bargaining a new contract two years later. As Robert Wilson, a representative of Local 30, told Hyperallergic in September 2022, union members had also continued working on a renovation project while MoMA was closed to the public, so “the argument that the museum would’ve had to lay them off was disingenuous.” More recently, Local 30 demonstrated outside MoMA PS1 this February, calling for higher wages.

MoMA cannot use artists who engage with working-class struggles to divert attention from how they treat their own workers. Propping up Frazier’s exhibition without serious reflection about its relationship to labor amounts to posturing at best and exploitation at worst. You could see their attempt to use the trauma and experiences of some workers to dismiss the concerns of others as the kind of propaganda that Frazier references in the billboard Who Gets To Go Forth? (Demystifying the Myth of the “Urban Pioneer”). Just as the Braddock government and Levi’s attempted to portray the city as a land of opportunity, hoping the public would forget what the government actually did (or didn’t do), MoMA hoped that visitors to Monuments of Solidarity might forget the abuses the institution itself has committed. In Who Gets to Go Forth?, Frazier includes a Martin Luther King Jr. quote: “This undue gullibility is also seen in the tendency of all too many readers to accept the printed word of the press as final truth. Very few people realize that even our authentic channels of information, the press, the platform and the pulpit, in many instances, do not give us objective and unbiased truth.”

MoMA claims to promote free expression and a range of political positions. But can freedom of expression exist at a museum opposed to honestly grappling with how labor operates within it? Absent a willingness to engage in workers’ perspectives that expose the museum’s own failings, MoMA’s Frazier exhibition failed to uplift the worker.