Art as Transformation: Using Photography for Social Change
Wednesday, March 26, 2025, at 5:00 pm
Plym Auditorium, Temple Buell Hall
611 E Lorado Taft Dr, Champaign
*Reception in the School of Art and Design Link Gallery to follow*
408 E Peabody Dr, Champaign
LaToya Ruby Frazier’s artistic practice spans a range of media, including photography, video, performance, installation art and books, and centers on the nexus of social justice, cultural change, and commentary on the American experience. In various interconnected bodies of work, Frazier uses collaborative storytelling with the people who appear in her artwork to address topics of industrialism, Rust Belt revitalization, environmental justice, access to healthcare, access to clean water, Workers’ Rights, Human Rights, family, and communal history.
Frazier’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions in the US and Europe and held in numerous public collections. In 2015, her first book The Notion of Family (Aperture, 2014) received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award. It told the story of how she, her mother, and grandmother survived environmental racism in historic steel mill town Braddock, Pennsylvania. Frazier published And from the Coaltips a Tree Will Rise in 2017 which expanded on her collaboration with a historic coal mining village in Borinage, Belgium. In 2020, her book LaToya Ruby Frazier received the Kraszna-Krausz Photography Book Award. That same year, she published The Last Cruze which expanded upon a 2019 exhibition about her collaboration with autoworkers in a historic labor union in Lordstown, Ohio. Frazier was named the inaugural recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation/Steidl Book prize for Flint Is Family in Three Acts about how working-class families survived the manmade water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
The School of Art and Design endeavors to be accessible to all. If you have questions or would like to request an accessibility accommodation, please email art@illinois.edu.
Presented by School of Art and Design, College of Fine and Applied Arts, School of Labor and Employment Relations,
Labor Education Program, Climate Jobs Institute, Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity, and Humanities Research Institute
