LaToya Ruby Frazier : monuments of solidarity

For more than two decades, the artist-activist LaToya Ruby Frazier has used photography, text, moving images, and performance to revive and preserve forgotten narratives of labor, gender, and race in the postindustrial era. Frazier has cultivated a practice that builds on the legacy of the social documentary tradition of the 1930s, the photo-conceptual forays of the 1960s and 1970s, and the work of socially conscious writers like Upton Sinclair, James Baldwin, and bell hooks.
Monuments of Solidarity celebrates the creativity and collaboration that persist in the face of industrialization and deindustrialization, racial and environmental injustice, gender disparities, unequal access to health care and clean water, and the erosion or denial of fundamental human rights. A form of Black feminist world-building, Frazier’s nontraditional “monuments” demand recognition of the crucial role that women and people of color have played, and continue to play, in histories of labor and the working class.