LaToya Ruby Frazier

Dans le prolongement de l'exposition de l'artiste américaine LaToya Ruby Frazier, le MACS a souhaité publier un ouvrage comprenant la reproduction des œuvres de la série Et des terrils un arbre s'élèvera complété par les témoignages des anciens mineurs et leurs familles suite à la découverte de l'exposition et au travail réalisé par l'artiste.
Issue de la classe ouvrière, LaToya Ruby Frazier naît en 1982 à Braddock, ville de la Rust Belt ravagée par la crise sidérurgique que connaissent les États-Unis sous le gouvernement Reagan, et dont elle dénonce l'abandon cynique par les pouvoirs publics, mais aussi la gentrification opportuniste de ses quartiers désertés. Dans cet ancien bastion de l'aciérie, désormais gagné par le chômage, la pollution et l'insalubrité, l'artiste grandit au sein d'une famille afro-américaine dont elle évoque l'histoire à travers The Notion of Family, une série de photographies qui renouvelle le documentaire social en critiquant la réalité « de l'intérieur ». En 2016, sa résidence au Grand-Hornu lui offre l'occasion de poursuivre en Belgique son travail sur la société post-industrielle en orientant son objectif vers le Borinage, une région minière dont l'activité, intense au 19e siècle, connaît au cours du 20e siècle une série de crises qui aboutit à la femerture du dernier charbonnage en 1976. Des témoignages que LaToya Ruby Frazier recueille auprès d'anciens mineurs ou de leurs familles, est ressorti Et des terrils un arbre s'élèvera, un vaste ensemble de photographies collaboratives où les récits s'enchaînent au rythme des portraits, des paysages et des natures mortes.

LaToya Ruby Frazier grew up in Braddock, in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, at the heart of the Rust Belt. The Bottom refers to the lower, poorest part of the town which is closest to the Edgar Thomson Plant, founded in 1872 by Andrew Carnegie. It was here that aged sixteen, LaToya Ruby Frazier became aware of the need to bear witness to the impact of deindustrialisation on the Afro-American community. She did so by photographing her family through three generations of women (her grandmother, her mother and herself), along with the landscapes of this former flagship of the steel industry which had by then been abandoned. Braddock's recent history, forged by resurgent waves of unemployment, mounting poverty, demographic decline, the appearance of diseases, hospital closures, are inscribed on the bodies and landscapes which LaToya Ruby Frazier juxtaposes in The Notion of Family. Laying claim to the heritage of socio-documentary photography initiated by the FSA (Farm Security Administration), LaToya Ruby Frazier adds to this archive of working-class reality begun in the 1930s by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and others, capturing the town's and her own family's history from the inside-which is what makes her work unique. Her political engagement and struggle against social inequalities are revealed in her rigorous photographic framing. Given this conceptual aspect, her photography reaches far beyond what is strictly considered as documentation.
As she takes up her stand at MAC's, she has delved into the history of Borinage and the coal industry by meeting former miners and their families to actively experience for herself what they have been through, by means of photographs of life. If the The Notion of Family series is anything to go by, this new exhibition could be seen as a prehistoric interpretation of Braddock's decline by the 1970s. It is through this return trip between the two works which convey the respective histories of Borinage and Braddock that the universal nature of the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier really comes out.
Awarded of the MacArthur fellowship in 2015, LaToya Ruby Frazier is considered a must-see artist of her generation. She has exhibited in the United States and France. Her work is seen in many museum and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, The Carnegie Museum of Art and the Pinault collection.