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art reviews from around new york

There is nothing wrong with an empty table in a diner. The waiter has set it for customers, and who knows but it is about to receive them.

Jeff Brouws, for all I know, may have asked them to wait while he snaps a photo. And if salt, pepper, cream, and ketchup are not your idea of sophisticated tastes, that is what diners then were for. You may still think of them as creature comforts. If the standard-issue black ashtray would look out of place today and a bit of a turn-off, this was the early 1990s, and Brouws often leaves hints of time and place in the most innocuous of settings.

There is nothing wrong either with a single car in an otherwise empty lot. An employee at the mall might have been early getting in or late getting home. Americans work hard, right? Yet it can only be a portrait of its time and of emptiness, much like the diner. Blame Joe Biden if you like for the American unease that could easily have turned the election to Donald F. Trump, or blame the media and right-wing propaganda in a time of unprecedented prosperity. Brouws, though, knew an earlier time when crime had only begun to fall and unease was anyone’s right. He, in turn, can take credit for photographing it. He can take even more for seeming to do so without really trying, at Robert Mann through December 6.

You may still think of malls as creature comforts, too, even as they fall victim of e-commerce. Just do so at your own risk. And Brouws photographs a world of impulse buying, even as impulsive acts lead to disaster. A car stands trapped in its own smoke and fire on the highway. The neon glow of a motel at night looks frighteningly cold. Could this have been so cold and so dangerous a time?

It could be almost anything. Back in Chelsea after the pandemic, the gallery calls the show “Just About Everything, Someplace Else,” after two photographs of spray-painted walls. The photographer, it says, has an eye for just about everything, but there is always that unsettling someplace else. He crosses America to find it, much like Robert Frank or Lee Friedlander. Unlike them, he works in color. He must relish the darkness of smoke and the brightness of fire, all but ordering you not to look away.

Unlike them, too, he all but omits people. Frank had his landmark with The Americans, but here Americans are present by what they leave behind. Bars and storefronts are at least partly boarded up, but you may still look inside to see what they were selling. With luck, the driver and passengers escaped a burning wreck. Come to think of it, a worker at the mall would probably claim a spot closer to the stores, not dead center. The car really could be abandoned, or it could take that much more care for its place.

Regardless, the work speaks of its time, between spray paint as urban blight and as entering the museum. If those slogans are graffiti, they are neatly executed. There may be tragedy on the highway, but also comedy in a car at a forty-five degree angle to an untended field. There may be beauty in a jazz singer and her unheard melodies. Titles spell out the location of each one. They want you to remember everything and something else.

From the very start, LaToya Ruby Frazier stepped outside the New York art scene. As a young artist, she returned to her family home in the Rust Belt. She photographed herself as one of three generations of women, as she puts it, “unified by illness” but the illness extends poignantly to race, gender, and poverty in America—and it is the subject of a longer review in my latest upload.

For Frazier, the decline of the Rust Belt can only be a family affair. Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, where Andrew Carnegie opened his first steel mill, she knows the people it employed, the jobs lost, and the desolation it brought to water, land, and air. Her mother had life-saving surgery at Braddock Hospital and still shows its scars. Her grandmother spent her failing days there, looking ever so smaller than her pathetic hospital bed. Frazier photographed both encounters with life and death for The Notion of Family, at the Brooklyn Museum in 2013, the series that occupied the first fourteen years of her adult life. And she still calls Braddock home.

Yet her notion of family has changed. More than ten years later, it extends to an entire city seen from above, where family and loss are only implicit but no less real. It extends, too, to other places where workers fight for their jobs and their very lives. She wants to give every loss a face and every face a voice, and photography itself has given way to photo essays, with personal accounts twice over, in images and text. She calls her midcareer retrospective “Monuments of Solidarity,” and it ends with words alone, at MoMA through September 7. Could, though, monuments overwhelm the artistry and solidarity the individual?

When White Columns presented “Monuments for the USA” some years ago, one had to expect an uneasy mix of patriotism and irony, and the group show delivered both. LaToya Ruby Frazier is interested in neither one. She accommodates many narratives and takes everything seriously. What begins as the story of black women “united in our illnesses” becomes first a town’s sickness and then a wider family. Auto workers in Ohio in 2019 include men and women, black and white, and their testimonies as well. Just past the exhibition’s exit, Frazier sings “Solidarity Forever,” the union anthem, to her own accompaniment on guitar.

This is not just about her. When Frazier began, family placed her among three generations, and their resilience stopped well short of boasting. In photos alongside her mother, they seem to share one set of eyes and lips. Yet shadows divide them, and her grandmother’s refuse, including a Pall Mall carton, litters the carpet. She was not yet thirty when she appeared among the emerging artists of “Greater New York” in 2010 and, as the family’s youngest, still coming to be. She returned in the 2012 Whitney Biennial and with “The Notion of Family” in Brooklyn, and I leave a fuller account of how much it moved me to the longer version of this review, with my report back then.

Still, things looked different from the moment she looked out and up. She could see the hospital, closed in 2010, in ruins and the view from a helicopter of a polluted river. She could see the town’s welcoming sign sponsored by a pest-control company and ads for Levis that took blue jeans and Braddock as the real America. If, as the ads read, “everybody’s work is equally important,” where are the black and women’s faces? A video in collaboration with Liz Magic Laser asks just that. It was time to head elsewhere.

In Flint Is Family, ending in 2020, families cling to their uncertain supplies of fresh water, and a mother and child leave for Mississippi. They might have needed the health-care workers in More Than Conquerors, which adds the last missing elements, photo essays. Workers pose for a picture and supply plenty of words, more than anyone is likely to read. Mounted on large steel frames, they become an installation. The health-care workers, in Baltimore, speak of inequality in opportunity for them and access to care for others. The auto workers in Ohio lament the last Chevy Cruze and what it means for them. They identify so much with their work that a worker crawls under the very last car to record its serial number.

The workers resist to the last, through their union, and Frazier shares their desperate optimism. She lays out the frames from Ohio in one long row, painted an industrial red, like an auto body run wild. “It is incumbent upon me to resist,” she says, “one photograph at a time, one photo essay at a time, one body of work at a time, one book at a time, one workers’ monument at a time.” It is getting harder, though, and the show ends with A Pilgrimage to Dolores Huerta, a migrant labor camp. The artist’s geography has left family and steel far behind. If you sense a collision in priorities between environmental degradation and job loss, Frazier is testifying to needs, not to a policy agenda.

The words of others are also her answer to the weight of the monumental. True, she is less and less vulnerable and closer and closer to a lecture, but “all I’m doing,” she says, “is showing up as a vessel.” On the Making of Steel in 2017 collaborated in its photography as well. Sandra Gould Ford, a steel worker who was losing her own job, takes up the camera. The curators, Roxana Marcoci wth Caitlin Ryan and Antoinette D. Roberts, give it an oval room under changing red light, to simulate the night sky that still overlooks it all. The overflow of words and the accompanying portraits, little more than selfies, are deadening nonetheless. Frazier has come a long way from the poignancy of the young photographer’s art, her stories, her family, and her illness.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.