Skip to main content
Artist/Maker
LaToya Ruby Frazier
(American, born 1982)
Publisher
Lower East Side Printshop, New York
Date2017
MediumFour cyanotypes
DimensionsSheet (each): 28 × 22 in. (71.1 × 55.9 cm)
Frame (each): 32 3/8 × 26 3/8 × 2 in. (82.2 × 67 × 5.1 cm)
Credit LinePurchase, William G. Roehrick '34 Art Acquisition and Preservation Fund
Object number2017.4a-d
Not on view
DescriptionBraddock, Pennsylvania, near Pittsburgh, is a Rust Belt city that has been in economic decline since the 1930s, although it is still the site of the country’s oldest fully integrated active steel mill. With the cessation of most industrial operations, however, the town’s residents have been left in poverty and ill-equipped to contend with the negative health effects brought about by factory waste. “Braddock is one of the most toxic places in America,” says the artist LaToya Ruby Frazier, who grew up in Braddock and is currently an assistant professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Much of Frazier’s practice to date has centered on her hometown. She captures the lives of her family and community through portraiture, self-portraiture, and performance in an effort to probe issues of social responsibility, environmental pollution, class structure, race relations, and the health care crisis. If Everybody’s Work Is Equally Important? (II) is part of a body of work created in reaction to a tonedeaf advertising campaign by Levi Strauss & Company that ran in 2010 comparing Braddock to the American frontier and including the slogans “Everybody’s Work Is Equally Important” and “Ready to Work.” Frazier remarked, “It’s particularly insidious when you put a black man in a photograph, and then you slap on top of it ‘Everybody’s work is equally important,’ especially when you know the history of the steel mills in Braddock. They didn’t want to employ us; they barely employed us.” This print series is related to a 2010 performance Frazier created in collaboration with the video artist Liz Magic Laser and performed outside a Levi’s pop-up store in Soho, the once gritty and arty, now thoroughly commercialized New York City neighborhood. In the performance, Frazier—clad in Levi’s denim—executed a series of choreographed movements borrowed from midcentury advertisements for the steel industry until she wore holes in the jeans. Issued in an edition of twelve, this suite of four cyanotypes—which recall denim in their coloration—documents four of the gestures. (SOURCE: Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS, 2017)
Collections
Additional Details
Exhibition History
2017
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College). "Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection," September 9 - December 10, 2017 (cat. no. 141, illus.).
Clinton, NY (Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College). "Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection," September 9 - December 10, 2017 (cat. no. 141, illus.).
Provenance
2016: Hamilton College (Ruth & Elmer Wellin Museum of Art), by purchase from the Lower East Side Printshop, New York.
Markings
Blindstamp: "[Lower East Side Printshop chop mark]" lower left corner.
Published References
Katherine D. Alcauskas, INNOVATIVE APPROACHES, HONORED TRADITIONS: THE RUTH AND ELMER WELLIN MUSEUM OF ART AT FIVE YEARS, HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE PERMANENT COLLECTION (Clinton, NY: Wellin Museum of Art, 2017), p. 304.
Signature
Signed "LaToya Ruby Frazier 2017" on verso at lower right corner in pencil.
Inscribed
"12/12" on verso at lower left corner in pencil.
Fred Korth
Date: c. 1940
Medium: Ferrotyped gelatin silver print
Object number: 2018.12.73
Wendy Red Star
Date: 2016
Medium: Lithograph with inkjet print
Object number: 2016.18
Unknown artist, Greek (Ancient)
Date: c. 1300-1100 BCE
Medium: Terracotta with slip
Object number: 2015.6.6
Jeffrey Gibson
Date: 2015
Medium: Glass and plastic beads, tin cones, steel and brass studs, nylon fringe, and artificial sinew on repurposed wool army blanket, mounted on repurposed canvas punching bag with steel chain
Object number: 2016.5
Alexa Kumiko Hatanaka
Date: 2021
Medium: Sumi paintings on washi, linocut on washi, rice bags, indigo, kakishibu, and gyotaku on washi, konnyaku, and handmade deckle box gampi paper
Object number: 2024.15
Thomas Nast
Date: published August 27, 1883
Medium: Wood engraving on newsprint
Object number: 1944.1.15
Thomas Nast
Date: published March 19, 1881
Medium: Wood engraving on newsprint
Object number: S2019.2.259
Date: 6th-8th century
Medium: Terracotta
Object number: 2015.6.49