Art Speaks is delighted to present a conversation between LaToya Ruby Frazier and Steve Locke
Free admission, no reservations
Drawing on their recent exhibitions—LaToya Ruby Frazier’s at MoMA and Steve Locke’s at MASS MoCA—these two politically engaged American artists will reflect on how in their works they negotiate racial, social, economic, and artistic structures of power. With shared interests in history, justice, racism, systemic violence, education, queer rights and health care, both consider their works as platforms from which to speak to the issues in the world that demand our attention.
The conversation will move from the macro to the micro, evoking their personal backgrounds, as well as the role of the artist, the writers that inform their thinking (James Baldwin in particular), their quite different relationships to portraiture, and their respective memorials for Breonna Taylor and Freddie Gray. By investigating labour conditions or the violence and policing enacted upon Black or queer people, Ruby Frazier and Locke lament injustices, acknowledge the victories gained in spite of continuing oppression, and examine the complex social relationships resulting from shared histories of marginalization, oppression and solidarities.
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LaToya Ruby Frazier’s work documents American post-industrial cities and their intersecting narratives of labor, gender, and race. A consummate activist and storyteller, her intimate photographs make visible the lives and resistances of working people in the face of environmental racism. Growing out of the legacy of Social Documentary, Frazier’s work reclaims dignity for her collaborators, offering insight into the human cost of industry. She teaches us how art is a powerful tool for social transformation.
LaToya Ruby Frazier has received numerous awards including a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and the ICP’s Infinity Award for Best Publication in recognition of her first book The Notion of Family. Her work is shown and collected globally, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Art Gallery of Ontario and The Museum of Modern Art in New York where she just just closed a extensive survey exhibition titled Monuments of Solidarity.
Steve Locke is an artist working across painting, drawing, sculpture and installation. His practice critically engages with the western canon to interrogate the connections between desire, identity, violence and memory. His practice asks us to confront and critically engage with a complicated present and painful past by reexamining relations between and among men, or how racism is intertwined with American culture.
Locke’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, and most recently at MASS MoCA, where, in August, he opened an expansive survey show titled The Fire Next Time. His works are collected by Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, AKG Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., among others.
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ART SPEAKS is dedicated to presenting a platform of international artists and thinkers to provoke and stimulate thought.
