IN CONVERSATION

Artist LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER and activist DOLORES HUERTA on finding PURPOSE, the nature of POWER, and why AMERICA is worth FIGHTING for

- ARIANA MARSH

LaToya Ruby Frazier's photographs document the challenges and inequities faced by people across America's heartland also serve as calls to action to help address them. Born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-bustling steel town near Pittsburgh, Frazier began capturing the profound toll that years of deindustrialization, economic devastation, and environmental abuse had taken on her community while she was still a teenager. Since then, she has continued to create images and videos that provide an intimate window into the lives of her subjects, often spending months and even years with them at a time.

The new exhibition "LaToya Ruby Frazier: Monuments of Solidarity," which opens on May 12 at New York's Museum of Modern Art, surveys nearly 25 years of the artist's practice. For the show, Frazier has reimagined some of her best-known bodies of work, which explore the health-care inequities facing Black working-class communities in the Rust Belt, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, and the impact of the closure of a General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, in a series of large-scale installations. Each one is what Frazier refers to as a "monument" to the people she has photographed and features first-person testimonials from the individuals who appear in the images.