Sanford Biggers' "Blossoms" at the Brooklyn Museum

Sanford Biggers' player-piano installation

In early 2012, the Brooklyn Museum held a major one-man show by the artist Sanford Biggers in the 5th floor atrium gallery. The centerpiece was a player piano playing the anti-lynching song "Strange Fruit," which was once song by Billie Holiday. The piece was called "Blossoms"(2007) and had a tree that went up for at least 20 feet, growing up through the piano. The song played on a continuous loop. I took my then-8-year-old daughter Sophie to the exhibit, and she asked me what the meaning of lynching was. It is an upsetting thing to explain to a child that many young black men (and the occasional woman) were murdered by mobs in the South throughout the 20th century.

Unfortunately, race is a wound in America that is nowhere near healed, no matter what the Supreme Court says.

The piano and tree were centered a a perfect circle of real dirt that the poor guard had to maintain when people stepped in the dirt and kicked it around.

Biggers' "Blossoms" is still at the museum, this time on the ground floor. A guard informed a visitor that "Strange Fruit" would play on the piano every half hour.

 "Blossoms" is much less grand this time around, and almost seems like an afterthought.  It is penned in too tight, but if you take a few minutes and meditate on the installation, some of its power comes back. "Blossoms" was made with Mr. Biggers genius, as well as wood, epoxy and the blood of hundreds of murdered African Americans over the last century.

 --Dylan Foley

LaToya Ruby Frazier at the Brooklyn Museum

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital

LaToya Ruby Frazier, self portrait during lupus attack

I first read about LaToya Ruby Frazier in a review in the New York Times last March. A photographer in her early thirties, Frazier's exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, "LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital," chronicles her family's life in the dying steel mill town of Braddock, Pennsylvania. The exhibit, which runs at the Brooklyn Museum until August 11th, and is the first major solo show by Frazier, a rising young photographer.

Frazier's camera is unblinking in recording the decline and death of her grandfather and grandmother, as well as her mother's battle with cancer and Frazier's own battle with lupus. The mills brought prosperity to the town and good blue-collar jobs, but poisoned the earth and its residents. The mills are now gone but the disease and despair remain.

The black-and-white prints show a town stripped of its wealth and future and a family that is waiting for the death of its elders. There is a photo of the grandfather in the hospital having his ass wiped. There are mournful images of the grandmother in her funereal house in a living room surrounded by dolls. There is the grandmother's bedside table, with her pack of Pall Malls (an old person's cigarette that gave the illusion of class) and old pictures of her children and grandchildren placed on a lace doily.

In one photo, the grandmother has dressed her granddaughter up as a doll, pulling her hair in long, twisted braids. For a brief moment that is frozen in time, the photographer has become a beautiful little girl.

During its heyday, Braddock had a thriving working-class black community. This community was written out of the official histories of the town, which was the site of Andrew Carnegie's first steel mill in the 19th century.
 

Frazier also records the gutting of Braddock, as the town's only hospital is shut down and brutally dismembered. A lone protester attacks the closure as part of a racist policy.









There is the unspoken dysfunction of Frazier's family. The mother has several boyfriends over the course of the exhibit's time frame, and in their photos, the older men are either posed stiffly or are shown in the dreary moments of waking up. In one portrait, her mother, who is a striking woman in her fifties, sits in a working-class gin mill at the bar, staring warily at her daughter's reflection. Above the mother's head hangs Christmas stockings, put up by a festive bartender or customer.

The exhibit is held in a dark gallery on the second floor. The wall paper behind the selected silver gelatin prints are historical photos of Braddock, family snapshots and other images taken by Frazier. The photographic wall paper is jarring, but works in following the chaos of the Frazier family life and how their destiny is directly linked to the town of Braddock.

in the photos in the exhibit, Frazier portrays a town and a family stripped of joy. It may be the photographer's choice not to show more joyful moments. In one poignant photograph, Frazier stands in front of her grandparents' house wearing her grandfather's pajamas. The image is an effective memorial to the dead man and the dying city.

Frazier herself has broken away. She now lives in both New Jersey and Brooklyn. In the exhibit, she looks at the wreckage of her family, the pieces of detritus on the floor after her late grandmother's carpet has been pulled up

At the end of the exhibit, Ruby LaToya Frazier and her mother are posed in front of the grandmother's coffin, for her wake, or what the African-American community would refer to as her homecoming. 

--Dylan Foley

Here is the New York Times review from late March:

Art Review

The Flesh and the Asphalt, Both Weak

LaToya Ruby Frazier Photography at Brooklyn Museum

Courtesy of LaToya Ruby Frazier and the Brooklyn Museum

“Fifth Street Tavern and UPMC Braddock Hospital on Braddock Avenue” (2011).

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: March 28, 2013

Braddock, Pa., is about nine miles southeast of Pittsburgh, hugging the eastern bank of the Monongahela River. But in the photographs of LaToya Ruby Frazier, who grew up in this steel town, its coordinates are not so precise. Braddock is in the bodies of Ms. Frazier’s elder family members, who used to work at the local mills; it’s in the empty foundation of the hospital that used to serve them, before it was closed and demolished. It’s there in every picture Ms. Frazier has taken, and it’s here in her outstanding first New York solo show.

“Momme Silhouettes” 

LaToya Ruby Frazier, the photographer and subject of “Huxtables, Mom and Me” (2009).

LaToya Ruby Frazier's "Grandma Ruby and Me" (2005).

Courtesy of LaToya Ruby Frazier and the Brooklyn Museum

LaToya Ruby Frazier's "Self Portrait In Gramps' Pajamas" (2009).

The exhibition, “LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital” at the Brooklyn Museum, follows her standout appearances in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and in the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” triennial of 2009. It offers further proof of her gifts and a deeper look at her series “The Notion of Family,” initiated in 2002.

This preternaturally mature body of work (Ms. Frazier is just 31) connects bedrooms and streetscapes, the suffering of loved ones and the afflictions of a “distressed municipality” (the state’s official term for Braddock and other ailing Rust Belt towns). Simultaneously introspective and extroverted, it’s composed of arresting black-and-white photographs that sometimes look like studio portraits or social documentaries but aren’t fully at home in either category.

Take “Huxtables, Mom and Me,” in which Ms. Frazier stares at the camera and her mother, reflected in a full-length mirror. She is wearing a faded T-shirt emblazoned with the cast and logo of “The Cosby Show,” a program she recalls having watched “to escape the reality of my dismantled working-class family.” You don’t even need to read that statement, in the wall label, to grasp that this is an image of regression to childhood that’s laced with a very adult sense of disillusionment.

Another photograph shows an elderly woman standing next to a lamppost outside the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in Braddock. It seems to belong to the genre of street photography — the woman does not make eye contact, and the camera catches a man striding through the intersection — but the main subject is identified as “Grandma Ruby,” and we have already seen her as the frail odalisque of “Grandma Ruby on Her Bed.” A few pictures later we will see her lying in her coffin, attended by her daughter and granddaughter and some dolls from her collection.

We will also see the hospital building, or what remains of it, after it’s been hit by the wrecking ball. Ms. Frazier’s series “Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save Our Community Hospital),” shown at the Whitney but not included here, fills the narrative gap. In one shot here a tavern sits on the edge of the rubble-strewn lot, looking very much like a ghost-town facade.

The show’s installation, overseen by the museum’s contemporary art managing curator, Eugenie Tsai, with generous input from Ms. Frazier, cuts back and forth between family and community scenes to filmic effect. It’s anchored by wallpaper at both ends of the gallery, an immersive patchwork reproducing Ms. Frazier’s works and found family photographs along with archival images of Braddock and other Rust Belt towns.

The wallpaper, Ms. Frazier says, was inspired by her discovery that a 2008 book on the history of Braddock contained no mention of African-Americans. A corrective to that history, the wallpaper is accompanied by a triptych of raster-etched aluminum plates that positions a childhood snapshot of Ms. Frazier between a biography of her ancestor John Frazier and a portrait of Andrew Carnegie.

Not as pointed, but more poignant, is the self-portrait she took in her grandparents’ old house after their deaths, wearing the pajamas of “Gramps” and looking alarmingly vulnerable in the decrepit interior. (This picture and related ones in the “Homebody” series, taken at the house, aren’t in the show, but this one is tucked into the museum’s fifth-floor collection display, “American Identities.”)

In another self-portrait she wears Grandma Ruby’s satin pajama pants and poses in front of a striped bedsheet (also her grandmother’s), looking haggard. The label tells us that this picture is one of several that document Ms. Frazier’s periodic attacks of lupus, an immune-system disease.

Here and in photographs of her mother and grandmother Ms. Frazier’s candid approach to illness may bring to mind projects like Hannah Wilke’s “Intra-Venus,” an intense photo diary of her terminal cancer.

Elsewhere Ms. Frazier looks at more than her own body. “I view Grandma Ruby, Mom and myself as one entity,” she has said. Ultimately, the photographs comment on the toxins lurking in Braddock and other deindustrialized cities, toxins that may also have sickened her mother and grandmother. (Ms. Frazier learned in 2008 that both had diagnoses of cancer.)

You can’t go home again, as the saying holds. In the photographs that make up “A Haunted Capital” Ms. Frazier is grappling with a different problem: not being able to leave.

“LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital” runs through Aug. 11 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, at Prospect Park; (718) 638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

High-Heeled Sneakers, Indian Style

I was walking through the American Wing on the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum today. The curators had changed a few of the exhibits.

I came across this mesmerizing pair of high-heeled Steve Madden sneakers, which had been reworked by a Native American artist named Teri Greeves. Greeves had beaded the sneaker with glass and bugle beads, as well as Swarovski crystals. The sneakers are called "Great Lake Girls" (2008) and shows two women dressed in full powwow regalia. Greeves is from the Kiowa tribe and was born in 1970.

The Brooklyn Museum is one of the underused cultural treasures of New York City. As compared to the Metropolitan and the Museum of Modern Art, the galleries are almost empty on most weekdays, and even on the weekend, the mornings there can be quite pleasant.

Our new tree guards on Washington Avenue

Hello fellow cooperators at 175 Eastern Parkway:

This past Tuesday, June 11th, Lyndon Lessie of C&L Welding installed our custom-made tree guards around our three trees on Washington Avenue.

We start with a big thanks to our coop president Rick and the board for their quick approval of the project. Previously, our battered trees had their roots entombed in cinder blocks and were a magnet for dog poop and trash. For a small expenditure by the coop, we now have these beautiful steel tree guards that enliven our once-dreary stretch of Washington Avenue.

Installing the tree guards

According to Van, our porter, the trees were planted by the city sometime in the past decade. At present, we have new soil and cedar mulch in the tree beds. At some point in the near future, we will be planting flowers at the base of the trees. Marije, who is both on the board and on the tree committee, will be organizing the planting.

Here is what our trees looked like on Monday:

Here is our northernmost tree now:

Special thanks to Van for all his work during the installation, as well as our super Juan. The tree committee consists of Myra, Amanda and Marije, as well as myself, Dylan Foley.