Womens History Museum, and LaToya Ruby Frazier

The act of moving through galleries and studios has become the rhythmic background music to our Thursdays and Fridays at AAP NYC. After another week measured by the steady pulse of  traveling to-and-fro for seminars, it may be safe to now say that we are metabolizing the concepts, sights, and smells of the city. Our group has acquired the know-how to meet earlier each time (still working on this, though); and when a director or curator’s voice speaks, necks mechanically crane, we whip out our blue tipped pens and start to intensely jot things down in our notebooks. There seemed to initially linger a slight post-vacation slowness; embarrassingly, there was a part of me that sometimes balked at the idea that any meeting after traversing the chaos-ridden MTA at 8:30 a.m. could be so urgent as to present ideas incommensurable to our own art-heavy experiences. But by now we’ve seen enough great shows and held engaging, eye-opening conversations to know better. Last week in particular struck true to this pattern: we visited Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 47 Canal, and listened to the artist Ruby LaToya Frazier discuss her work.

Gavin Brown Enterprise, on Grand Street, presented the opportunity to flit through racks of delicately constructed boutique wear, suspended dresses, and stuffed sculptures all created by designer duo Womens History Museum. This was their debut – described to be “radical anti-fashion” designers, their formerly elusive practice surfaced to the public through this particular exhibition. The furniture pieces and dresses shared a visual quality that was gold and gauzy, selectively patched together from fabric scraps and materials that invoke the regal and fluttery. Our conversation within the exhibition space circled around topics of associating the unisex with progressiveness, how brands might deal with questions of femininity and participate in its acceptance. We then walked down to the second floor of the building to briefly enter 47 Canal, and listened to director Jamie Kenyon speak on the upcoming shows and possible opportunities for those interested in the gallery’s organization and work.

Next we went uptown to Gavin Brown’s gallery space on 127th street. Coincidentally, we entered when the exhibition was being introduced to visitors by the artist herself, Latoya Ruby Frazier. Our class quickly huddled around to hear her discuss Flint is Family, her photography and research on the Michigan water crisis.

It was a surreal experience in which we were fortunate enough to hear Frazier speak powerfully of her examination of race, class, gender, and citizenship affecting communities in the form of environmental, planetary despoliation. It was clear that her exhibition had a necessarily expressed order of narrative. On the first floor, her photographs related recent experiences of the horrible lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan, and how the crisis was instigated by Governor Snyder’s racist administrative practices. On the upper floors, she told us of her personal familial history of poverty and intolerance in her hometown in Braddock, Pennsylvania. In grappling with these issues, Frazier’s call to artistic action and away from complacency compelled us to rethink our own creative work, and to think from our hearts as we approach creating important narratives in the future. How can we stop ourselves from actively repeating catastrophic mistakes, to share our ethics with people in different spaces and make impact?