Artist, Activist, Activist, Community Builder, Teacher, Latoya Ruby Frazier's ideas of art making come together in her first retrospective exhibition.

Jeffrey Brown has the story for art and action, our ongoing look at the intersection of arts and democracy,

and part of our series, canvas.

They are monuments of a kind we're not used to seeing.

Artworks intended to honor workers, document and address economic and social

ills, and bring about small d democratic action. LatoL Toya Ruby Frazier calls her exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art

monuments of solidarity, tapping the power of photography.

We live in a world where we're pretty desensitized, right?

And we just want to keep swiping through images and we're not really pausing and

slowing down and thinking about what the power of images actually are.

I believe in the power of photography, the power of photography to reshape how we see

ourselves in our families, in our communities, in the world, how we see ourselves in our families, in our communities, in the world, how we relate to other people.

Frazier first gained notice in a 2015 MacArthur Genius Award for a series she titled The Notion of Family, portraying herself, her mother,

and grandmother within the larger context of America's industrial decline.

She grew up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once thriving town where Andrew Carnegie built his first steel mill, now in economic distress.

Her museum retrospective begins there, enhanced with silent videos, and a wall installation

a kind of poem listing various toxins found in Bradoc's air. She shows the closing of a major medical center.

And her response to Art to a Levi Strauss ad campaign

that used her town as a setting for so-called urban pioneers and featured a tagline that read

Go Forth. Frazier asked, Go Forth where?

I'm very interested in that as an artist and as a citizen ways that we're able to show up for other people

Especially people who may not be able to give us anything in return if one wants to explore those issues in our culture and society and politics,

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