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I was already on my way to New York last week when I got a message from a friend about LaToya Ruby Frazier.
Erik Ruin, a fellow leftist-political artist, had no idea I was about to visit the city, so it was a perfect synchronicity when he recommended the show at MoMA: a massive retrospective about auto workers and union organizers! I knew I had to go see it.
LaToya Ruby Frazier grew up in Braddock, a small rust belt city near Pittsburgh, PA; and her impressively vast retrospective at age 42 opens with an intimate set of family portraits. In The Notion of Family, her camera lingers especially on her Grandma Ruby, taking in small details of the end of a life. An empty recliner, detritus strewn across a shaggy carpet, and finally, a self-portrait of Frazier beside her mother at Grandma Ruby’s wake.
Next, Frazier photographs her mother’s cancer diagnosis. The story expands beyond the home, out to the blighted landscape of Braddock, and to the cloud of industrial pollution that brings exceptional rates of cancer and asthma into its working-class neighborhoods. We see that the intimate, personal struggles of Frazier’s life are part of a larger system: one that has poisoned many families like hers.
In 2011, Braddock shuttered the hospital at the center of Frazier’s community, where her Grandma Ruby received treatment before she passed away. Braddock Hospital was a lifeline for the town’s residents, as they navigated similar health issues to Frazier’s family—illnesses born from hard labor and toxic industry. The artist photographs the community as they come out in protest, waving picket signs and begging for someone to care about their neighborhood. But the hospital never reopens.
Braddock, through Frazier’s eye, looks like many rust belt towns that were hit hard by the decline of the steel industry. At one point, its austere scenery becomes an aesthetic backdrop for a massive Levi Jeans advertising campaign. Models dressed as “urban pioneers” evoke the masculine ruggedness of the industrial landscape, repeating the marketing slogan: “go forth.”
This is where I really connect with Frazier on an artistic level. Like her, I get angry about how capitalists frame our lives and stories, attempting to capture the aesthetic beauty of working-class life, while ignoring their contributions to the reason people struggle in the first place.
In a video performance, Frazier responds to Levi with defiance, showing up in front of a brick-and-mortar location in Braddock to distress and destroy a pair of Levi jeans. As she scrapes her body in tiny, frictional movements against the concrete ground, it reminds me of the repetitive, mechanical gestures made by workers on an industrial assembly line. By the end of the video, the clothing hangs limp and unrecognizable from her body.
“Who gets to go forth?” Frazier wonders repeatedly throughout the exhibit. Her photographs, presented alongside long personal stories she collects from working-class people in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio, and Maryland, suggest that it’s not the laborers who built these lucrative industries, and then got stuck with the fallout after they left. Rather the only people truly going forth are the corporations and their profiteers.
The retrospective contains multiple bodies of work, like 2016’s Flint is Family; the product of several months Frazier spent living in the Michigan town that is now infamous for its lack of clean water. In A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta, Frazier follows and photographs the civil rights leader who helped found the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez.
The biggest, most ambitious section of Monuments of Solidarity is The Last Cruze, which documents former workers at a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio.
Stepping into this exhibit gave me chills. In the center of the room, I instantly recognized the sculptural shape of the chassis: the structure that carries a vehicle down the line at an auto assembly factory. When I created my most recent tapestry about Volkswagen workers, I watched hours of videos of cars on a chassis just like this, marveling at how the vehicles slowly came into form as they moved through stations of expertly skilled hands.
Frazier’s striking red sculpture resembles a cathedral as much as an assembly line. This, she explains, is her monument to solidarity. In the places you’d expect to find cars, the artist places portraits of workers alongside lengthy personal interviews about the Lordstown Cruze plant. In 2018, GM announced the closure of the entire facility, putting thousands of union members with the United Auto Workers out of a job.
As you roll through the line, you take in each person’s face, their story about their job, and the intimate ways their lives are enmeshed with the factory and with UAW Local 1112. Workers talk about the generations of their family whose livelihoods depended on the auto industry. They speculate on where they’ll have to relocate to keep paying the bills. They mourn the loss of friendships at the plant.
Meanwhile, you can hear an audio interview rolling with Kasey King, a plant worker who took photographs of her last day on the job. King’s images follow the last car on the line, documenting the emotional faces of workers making the last tiny movement they’ll ever get to make at their station.
As the last car comes and goes, the workers are left facing the empty chassis. They hug and cry. They catch up with the car and drape an American flag, and then a UAW flag, over its hood.
“This is where I really started to lose it,” King says. She climbs up on a piece of scaffolding to take a group photo of her coworkers, who she calls her family. She says the union job has brought them all very close, lifting the diverse group over divisional lines of gender and race. Inside the plant, she says she doesn’t think about being a woman. She does the same work as everybody else, and she feels equally respected for it.
The Lordstown workers don’t understand why the plant has to shutter. They’ve worked hard for decades to produce a world-class vehicle for GM, bringing massive profits to the corporation. But when the company decides it’s time to discontinue the car, there is no discussion about bringing a new product to Lordstown. The workers are rewarded with a layoff for their years of service.
In 2023, the UAW announced that 800 workers, many of them from Local 1112, would receive almost $8 million in back pay from GM. The Lordstown plant closure had not only been callous and cruel—it had also breached the company’s contract with the union.
Many displaced workers from the GM plant have since ended up at the nearby Ultium battery plant in Lordstown. GM co-owns this facility, and until a few weeks ago, the corporation paid battery workers substantially less than they would make at an auto assembly job. Local 1112 fought to organize the Ultium plant, and just days ago, the workers at Ultium won a tentative contract agreement that the UAW calls “EV industry-defining.”
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I admire Frazier’s capacity for listening. The amount of oral histories she’s collected are impressive on their own. She has a skillful ability to bring together not just workers and community members of the areas she studies; but to listen to their grandparents, children, preachers, nurses, community activists, and other members of their large and complicated networks.
If you have any familiarity at all with my artistic practice, you can understand why Latoya Ruby Frazier’s work is so exciting to me. Stepping inside a contemporary working-class monument makes me feel even more determined to push forward with my own attempts at memorializing and venerating the labor movement.
If I came away from the show with one resolution, it’s to pursue those stories in my own community with determination, and listen just as long.