LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital @Brooklyn Museum

JTF (just the facts): A total of 33 black and white photographs, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in a single long gallery space on the second floor of the museum. All of the works are gelatin silver prints, made between 2002 and 2011; no physical dimensions or edition information were provided. The show also includes 3 sets of 3 raster etched aluminum plates, made in 2010, and two end walls covered in custom wallpaper, made in 2013. This is Frazier's first solo show in New York. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: While LaToya Ruby Frazier's photographs have found their way into a number of important group shows and biennials in recent years, this show finally offers an opportunity to see a larger selection of her recent work in one place. Frazier's penetrating black and white images of her family and the surrounding community of Braddock, PA, feel at first glance like a throwback to a style of concerned social documentary from decades earlier. But this is really only the first layer of a complex multi-pronged exploration, with interior still lifes, portraits of her mother and aging grandparents, and unflinching self-portraits added to the mix, making her investigations much closer than arm's length, more intimate and personal. With a further element of archival research and the related study of collective and individual memory, her photographs come together in a satisfyingly interleaved whole, touching on repeated themes from a variety of angles.

Frazier's images in and around Braddock capture a depressing sense of decay and inattention. Overgrown greenery covers boarded up buildings and chokes the remaining trees, smoky factories sit idle, and the local hospital is demolished into a pile of rubble. The once prosperous steel industry of Andrew Carnegie is a faint memory, leaving behind the ghostly shell of its prior glory, along with plenty of toxic leftovers, environmental damage, and jobless workers. The fact that a tavern is left standing like a stage set amid the crushed cement of the old hospital is a quiet testament to the trade-offs this community has been forced to make.

But Frazier isn't content to document the struggles of this place from afar; the best of her pictures track her own extended family as it is pushed and pulled by disease, poverty, and a lack of options. Abstract problems are given real human faces, as Grandma Ruby cares for her ailing husband, travels to the hospital, arranges her collection of dolls, and ultimately becomes painfully frail herself. The wearying force of the entire situation comes through poignantly as Grandma Ruby dies, her formal wake and her now empty recliner equally dispiriting. Frazier's images of her mother tell a different tale of trapped endurance, one of cramped apartments, dead end jobs, boyfriends, surgeries, and Red Cross blankets; there is little joy in her face, but plenty of determined, supportive resolve. When seen together, the three generations of women remind us of the scale and duration of these fraying communal issues, of intractable problems passed down through the years and strong women trying hard to find ways to make the best of it.

While Frazier's portrait of her family and hometown is certainly disheartening, there is never of feeling of giving up. These are hard hitting, honest pictures, but they leave you with a sense of quiet tenacity, where outrage is joined with practical making do. The issues she depicts are entirely specific but broadly universal, showing just how closely the complex well being of local citizens is tied to the often overlooked historical and intergenerational roots of the community in which they live.

 

Collector's POV: Since this is a museum show, the works on view have no posted prices. Frazier doesn't seem to have any New York gallery representation at the moment; Galerie Michel Rein in Paris (here) appears to be her only outlet at this time. With little or no secondary market history for her work, gallery retail will be the best/only option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Artist site (here)
• Features/Reviews: New York Times (here), New Yorker (here)
• Interview: Art in America (here)

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital

Through August 11th

 

Brooklyn Museum

200 Eastern Parkway

Brooklyn, NY 11238

Moveable Feast: Fresh Produce and the NYC Green Cart Program @MCNY

JTF (just the facts): A group show containing 112 black and white and color images from 5 different contemporary photographers, variously framed and matted, and hung in the entry and main divided gallery space on the first floor. An introductory room containing 19 vintage works from 12 different photographers/artists begins the exhibit and provides some historical context. The new work was commissioned by the NYC Green Cart Program, the Aperture Foundation, and the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund. Newspaper style brochures of the work of each of the 5 main photographers are available for free in the galleries; these are high qaulity and worth taking. (Installation shots at right.)
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The following photographers are included in the main exhibit, with the number of images on view and details in parentheses:
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LaToya Ruby Frazier (6 archival pigment prints, 10 gelatin silver prints, 2009/2010)

Thomas Holton (19 chromogenic prints, 2009/2010)

Shen Wei (8 archival pigment prints, 2010)

Gabriele Stabile (48 chromogenic prints, 1 journal, 2010)

Will Steacy (21 archival pigment prints, 2010)
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The introductory room contains vintage material from the following photographers, with the number of images on view and dates in parentheses:
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Berenice Abbott (2, 1936/1938)

John Albok (1, 1935)

Byron Company (3, 1899/1900)

Nicolino Calyo (3 watercolors)

Ronald Dubin (1, 1947)

Alta Ruth Hahn (2, 1935)

Susan Lorkidkatz (1, 1978)

Edward Martin (2, 1997/1998)

Roy Perry (1, 1940)

Jacob Riis (1, 1895)

Anne Shanks (1, 1955)

Dan Weiner (1, 1951)
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Comments/Context: On the surface, the idea of commissioning five contemporary photographers to take pictures of the sidewalk produce carts in New York city might seem like a project doomed to obscurity, mostly by its inherent narrowness - how many different ways are there, really, to make images of fruit and vegetable vendors? What is astonishing about this show is just how varied the approaches ended up being, and how compelling these stories actually are, especially when seen together as facets of the same whole.
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Of the five bodies of work on view, I found Will Steacy's photographs to be the most haunting, even though there isn't a single produce cart in any of his images. Steacy took the unorthodox approach of making pictures of the environment in which the green carts reside, picking a single location in the Bronx, and then documenting the food options within a roughly 10 block radius of the cart. The result is a contextual map of the neighborhood, with a parade of dismal fast food, from pizza to burgers, deli sandwiches to Mexican, all cheap and easily accessible, and often discarded on the sidewalk. It's a powerful, sometimes ugly, portrait of the problem the green carts are trying to solve.
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Shen Wei also came at the green cart commission from an unexpected angle. His images are elegant still lifes of the food that came from the carts, laid out in pure light on white tablecloths (almost with a nod to Laura Letinsky). The effect is simple and quiet, where watermelons and bananas become sculptural, often still adorned by stickers or packing boxes.
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Gabriele Stabile and Thomas Holton looked beyond the carts to the customers and vendors themselves. Both got to know the people involved, tracking them to their homes, seeing how their lives have been impacted by the buying and selling of fresh produce. Stabile's images are full of family meals, where shopping and cooking are preludes and processes. Holton spent his time with two Bangladeshi vendors, following their struggles both at the cart and beyond.
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LaToya Ruby Frazier's images are more like traditional street photography than the work of any of the others. They capture the juxtaposition and connection of opposites and the mixing of different kinds of people on the city's sidewalks, catching patrons with a handful of fruit or vendors standing idly waiting for the next sale.
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Taken together, these different approaches create a surprisingly robust and multi-layered picture of the impact of these carts. This exhibit is far more nuanced and engaging than you would ever expect, finding subtleties of influence that spread out from the food to a wide range of lives and communities. The photography is consistently well executed, and the overall message is effective: while the battle may be uphill and the existing environment often hostile to their arrival, these produce carts really do work, in all kinds of less than obvious ways.
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Collector's POV: As this is a museum exhibit, there are no prices for these prints. The five main photographers in this show are represented by the following New York galleries:

• LaToya Ruby Frazier: Higher Pictures (here)
• Thomas Holton: Sasha Wolf Gallery (here)
• Shen Wei: Daniel Cooney Fine Art (here)
• Gabriele Stabile: unknown
• Will Steacy: Michael Mazzeo Gallery (here)

In general, their work has not found its way into the secondary markets much (if at all), so gallery retail is likely the only option for interested collectors at this point.
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Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)
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Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)
• LaToya Ruby Frazier artist site (here)
• Thomas Holton artist site (here)
• Shen Wei artist site (here)
• Gabriele Stabile artist site (here)
• Will Steacy artist site (here)

Moveable Feast: Fresh Produce and the NYC Green Cart Program

Through July 10th
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Museum of the City of New York

1220 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10029

Greater New York 2010 @MoMA PS1

JTF (just the facts): A large group show of recent contemporary work made by New York-based artists, displayed across all four floors of the PS1 building. A total of 68 artists have been included in the exhibit, 19 of which (roughly 28%) can be called photographers (using a broad definition of that term). The show was curated by Klaus Biesenbach, Connie Butler, and Neville Wakefield. Unfortunately, PS1 has both prohibited photography in the galleries and failed to provide images of the included works on its public website, so annoyingly, this review has neither installation shots or image highlights.

The following photographers are included in the exhibit, with the number of images on view in parentheses:

Michele Abeles (7)
Deville Cohen (3, 1 video)
LaToya Ruby Frazier (12, 1 video)
Zipora Fried (3)
Daniel Gordon (5)
K8 Hardy (18)
Alisha Kerlin (8)
Deana Lawson (6, 1 large installation)
Leigh Ledare (22, 1 stack of images, 3 videos)
Alice O'Malley (12)
Lucy Raven (1 photo animation, 1 video, 1 case of ephemera)
Mariah Robertson (8)
David Benjamin Sherry (19)
Erin Shirref (28)
Xaviera Simmons (1 grid of 42, 2 others)
A.L. Steiner (1 three wall installation)
Elisabeth Subrin (4)
Hank Willis Thomas (1 set of 82)
Pinar Yolacan (8)

Comments/Context: Given our passionate interest in photography, sprawling group shows like Greater New York always feel like a bit like a treasure hunt; we wander through the galleries in search of the photography, never knowing what might be beyond the next white wall. With this show's thematic focus on brand new work from emerging contemporary artists from the New York area, we expected to be surprised and challenged by some work and to be bored by much of the rest, and hoped to be introduced to some new names worth keeping an eye on. I think our expectations were realistically low, and I think the show delivers the ungainly mixed bag that we expected.

Trying to discern themes or patterns in such a diverse body of photography is a tricky prospect, but given the high highs and the low lows we have experienced in the past five tumultuous years, the fact that so much of the photographic work on display is inward looking and self reflective, with a heavy dose of performance, was a surprise. Perhaps this is a result of early career artists still looking to refine their voices and seeking that clarity by peering inward, but I came away a bit troubled by the tin ear the New York artists seem to be showing toward the important issues of the day. I'm a sucker for big meaty new ideas that make my eyes bug out, but most of the photography I found here was both preoccupied with personal nuances and lacking in radical innovation.

That isn't to say that there wasn't plenty of work to enjoy on display. I've detailed a handful of favorites and special attractions below:

• I stood in front of Xaviera Simmons' large array of appropriated images of boat people and refugees hung in the entry of the show for quite a long time, feeling the combination of isolation, desperation and wild hope of being packed in like sardines on a makeshift raft or rusting barge, heading for the unknown. This was one of the only pieces in the exhibit that I thought tried to get at the uncertain spirit of the times, that sense of unease and lack of control that has been so common of late.
• Deville Cohen's sparse constructed scenes, made up of ladders, step stools and shredded paper, and pictures of ladders and step stools, have intriguing layers in their simple conceptual inversions. The video of the fake car wash (once again made from these primary materials) mixes humor and creative inventiveness to successfully evoke an everyday object. These works seem like a promising set of ideas worth further exploration.
• Pinar Yolacan's Mother Goddess series also uses a relatively simple construct to generate something more powerful. In these works, Yolacan completely covers her models from head to toe, wrapping them like mummies in skin tight cocoons of denim, black latex, or patterned fabric. They are then posed against monochrome colored backgrounds, lounging like odalisques. The resulting images are weirdly mute, like ancient fertility figurines or fetish objects.
• LaToya Ruby Frazier is clearly another emerging photographer with some momentum behind her. Her formally crisp and sinuously elegant black and white studies of falling down houses, piles of trees, bedside tables and a burger on a countertop are entirely evocative of a certain set of personal life circumstances. In this case, a look inward has produced something that isn't overly self-conscious, but is rather abstracted just enough to be universal, both unflinching and quietly beautiful at the same time.
• The work of Mariah Robertson, Hank Willis Thomas, and Daniel Gordon on view is generally a repeat or a refinement of work we have seen recently at other NY venues. Robertson's 88 is different than her single, ragged edged works in that it is a long ribbon of overlapping imagery, billowing across the ceiling and piling up on the floor, mixing checkerboards, piles of books, petrified wood, and chemical drips in her signature darkroom style; her aesthetic is growing on me over time. It was also terrific to see Thomas' full Unbranded series (82 images), where appropriated advertisements have been stripped of their logos, leaving behind a distorted history of black culture since 1968; while the pictures stand on their own as individual artworks, seeing the series together adds a layer of elapsed time and a view into the evolution of cultural stereotypes.
• K8 Hardy's self portraits have a playfulness that is infectious. Across the wall, she shape shifts, alternately posing with purple hair, puckered lips, orange sunglasses, wearing a wrestling belt, or standing with lawn mowers, often adding in a seemingly random photogram for effect. It sounds overly staged I know, but somehow it all works, successfully mixing eccentric personal style and play acting.
• I can't really say that I liked Leigh Ledare's erotic images of his mother's sex life, but they certainly push on cultural taboos and get your attention. They combine a sense of tragedy with creepy repulsiveness; they're explicit, confrontational, disturbing, and sad all at the same time. My guess is most people will truly hate these pictures, but like them or not, they're challenging and weirdly memorable.

Overall, I think there are a few nuggets of photographic promise to be found amidst the slurry here if you are willing to invest the time in exploring the endless jumble of rooms filled with art. While I was pleased to see how much photography has become intertwined with the general practice of contemporary art making, particularly in the NY scene, I have to say I was a bit disappointed that so few in this emerging bunch seem to have found a singular voice of durable originality.

Collector's POV: Since most of these artists are early in their careers and the work is generally fresh out of the studio, none of it has yet migrated to the secondary markets. So the only real option for interested collectors is to follow up with gallery representatives or directly with the artists themselves. Below is a first pass list of easily identifiable gallery relationships and artist websites; if I've missed (or misidentified) important relationships or sites, please add them in the comments for the benefit of all:
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Michele Abeles: artist site (here)
Deville Cohen: Nowhere Gallery (here)
LaToya Ruby Frazier: Higher Pictures (here), artist site (here)
Zipora Fried: On Stellar Rays (here)
Daniel Gordon: Zach Feuer Gallery (here), artist site (here)
K8 Hardy: Reena Spaulings Fine Art (here)
Alisha Kerlin: artist site (here)
Deana Lawson: artist site (here)
Leigh Ledare: was Rivington Arms (here); not sure now
Alice O'Malley: Isis Gallery (here), artist site (here)
Lucy Raven: artist site (here)
Mariah Robertson: Marvelli Gallery (here), artist site (here)
David Benjamin Sherry: artist site (here)
Erin Shirref: Lisa Cooley Fine Art (here), artist site (here)
Xaviera Simmons: unknown
A.L. Steiner: unknown
Elisabeth Subrin: Sue Scott Gallery (here)
Hank Willis Thomas: Charles Guice Contemporary (here), artist site (here)
Pinar Yolacan: was Rivington Arms (here), not sure now; artist site (here)

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Reviews: NY Times (here), Village Voice (here), WNYC Gallerina (here), L Magazine (here), Huffington Post (here)

Greater New York 2010
Through October 18th

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101