1930 Poplar Ave
Memphis, TN 38104
USA
Memphis College of Art’s 2017 Downing Pryor Distinguished Visiting Lecturer is LaToya Ruby Frazier, an internationally recognized photographer and 2015 MacArthur Fellow. Frazier works in photography, video and performance to build visual archives that address industrialism, rustbelt revitalization, environmental justice, healthcare inequity, family and communal history. Frazier received the International Center for Photography Infinity Award in 2015 for her book “The Notion of Family” (Aperture, 2014). Frazier has exhibited widely around the United States and internationally at venues including the Brooklyn Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Massachusetts, the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, and the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
Frazier’s lecture is titled “Art as Transformation: Using Photography for Social Change.” Below is an excerpt describing what Frazier will discuss during her lecture:
“Each day, we’re bombarded by images: on billboards, on screens, in schools and in our bedrooms. And these images, largely corporate in origin, carry power—power to shape, control, and constrain—even when they offer a fantasy, or an outright lie.
That’s why, as LaToya Ruby Frazier argues, photography is a battleground of representation. We cannot control the material circumstances of our birth, our families or our economic circumstances. But in order to change society—to seed real change and cultural transformation, especially for the marginalized and the forgotten—we must change the picture we have of ourselves and our communities.
In this talk, Frazier discusses how she has used photography to fight injustice—poverty, healthcare and gender inequality, environmental contamination, racism, and more—and create a more representative self-portrait. Drawing from her book ‘The Notion of Family,’ as well as from works of art by Frederick Douglass, August Sander, Julia Margaret Cameron, and Langston Hughes, Frazier relates her conscious approach to photography; opens up more authentic ways to talk about family, inheritance, and place; and celebrates the inspirational, transformative power of images.”
Memphis College of Art will host a reception and book signing in the Main Gallery starting at 6 p.m., with the lecture to follow at 7 p.m.
Photo: Courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation