A Monument to Workers’ Thoughts: LaToya Ruby Frazier and Kathë Kollwitz at MoMA
Until GM shuttered their plant in 2019, the auto workers at the Chevy factory in Lordstown, Ohio and the curators at the Museum of Modern Art in New York shared a union. They were both part of the United Auto Workers. When PASTA, MoMA’s union, was founded in 1971, the economy was at its flattest, and the country, in the postwar decades, had grown faster and become more prosperous than ever before. In contrast to the steady growth of the economy, the tumult of the sixties provoked people to interrogate their rights, their desires, and their understanding of fulfillment. The labor movement was by no means immune to these forces. By the early 1970s, Midwestern auto workers openly wondered about satisfaction beyond material gains and protections on the picket line while Manhattan curators could assert, for the first time, that their role as cultural arbiters was, in fact, work, and that they too had material concerns.
One year after PASTA organized, Lordstown was the site of one of the most notorious wildcat strikes that took place in the waning days of labor’s postwar power. In 1972, the Lordstown auto workers walked off the job and shut down the Chevy plant for twenty-two days. Historian Jefferson Cowie singles Lordstown out as being “the iconic conflict of seventies working-class history.” Unlike the image of postwar labor as stolid and bureaucratic, the strikers had a “refreshing vision of youth, vitality, inter-racial solidarity, and enlightenment hidden from the public behind the likes of television’s Archie Bunker, pro-war leadership, and the growing politics of the blue-collar backlash.” These young, cool autoworkers were part of a sixties generation that brought to boil “simmering issues of alienation, industrial boredom, and the failure of postwar collective bargaining to take into account the quality of worklife.” As Lordstown workers so publicly questioned the satisfaction their work brought them, Newsweek declared the strike “industrial woodstock.” It had challenged a strict dichotomy of labor and the values of the sixties. There, at least briefly, labor met the counterculture.
PASTA, which is now part of the UAW, was another amalgam of labor and the counterculture. Its members were part of the 1960s’ experimental art world. They had decided that the best way to advance their ideas about conceptual art and feminism was through the surprising vehicle of a labor union. By choosing an organizational form that was dependent upon work, they clearly asserted that their cultural work was work. Today, MoMA carries these events of the early 1970s forward. It has on display several images from Lordstown as part of its excellent retrospective, Monuments of Solidarity, on the work of LaToya Ruby Frazier. One of the most striking pieces in the exhibit is The Last Cruze, a large-scale installation featuring a fire-truck red structure of uniformly spaced, nave-like metal arches that recall at once an assembly line and the interior of a cathedral. It commemorates the construction of the final Chevy Cruze in 2019, when GM closed the plant. On each arch, Frazier exhibits photographs and excerpts of interviews with UAW members and their families, some of whom spent decades at the factory. In The Last Cruze and throughout the retrospective, Frazier attempts to monumentalize the world surrounding the Cruze. A world which, as Frazier captured, was in the process of dissolving.
Frazier wants to slow these moments of change down, hold them fast, and provide them with the level of reflection given to art in prestigious spaces like MoMA’s galleries. The exhibit opens with her instruction that we understand her works as “monuments for workers’ thoughts.” Her drive to monumentalize and make visible the thoughts and perspectives that construct her subjects’ world is personal. Born in Braddock, Pennsylvania— a Rust Belt borough that has gone from steel town, to hospital town, to a site of capital flight— Frazier is a contemporary American artist known primarily for her photography, installations, and performance pieces. She regularly inserts herself into her portrayal of blue collar work. Her own artistic labor is immediately fused with that of her subjects. Frazier sees work on a grand scale, as something more expansive than a job that pays the bills. Like Lordstown in 1972, Frazier understands work today as something that both incorporates and transcends the material. It undergirds family, friendship, physicality, neighborhoods, corporations, economies, and nations.
The exhibit’s first section, Notion of Family (2001-2014), underscores this web of interconnection. Frazier as a teenager, her mother, and grandmother are the primary subjects of these early works, as they go about their everyday tasks and cycle who’s behind the camera. Often, their bodies are on display. Her mother and grandmother worked at the local UPMC Braddock Hospital. When the hospital closed in 2010, an already deindustrialized area experienced another devastating round of capital flight. In Frazier’s 2010 piece John Frazier, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Andrew Carnegie, she trifurcates a picture into a plaque dedicated to John, the town’s founder in 1753, the artist as a girl, and Carnegie, the steel magnate, whose business brought initial prosperity to Braddock. The piece reflects how inextricably bound Frazier, her neighbors, and the town are to their sources of capital and to their long history. UPMC hospital partially filled the vacuum left by the steel mills. Once it shuttered, Frazier documents the desiccated structure of the building in her haunting UPMC Braddock Hospital and Holland Avenue Parking Lot (2011). The photograph of the gutted building hangs alongside portraits that capture the fraying social ties of the city and echoes the toll of such hard work on the bodies and psyches of her family who remain.
For much of its run, the Frazier retrospective coincided with an exhibit on the work of Kathë Kollwitz, who, according to Starr Figura and Maggie Hart, the exhibit’s curators, was “committed to art of a social purpose.” Kollwitz, a German Expressionist known for her drawings and prints, lived and worked from the late nineteenth century until her death in 1945, just sixteen days before the end of the war. The show opens with her early commitment to making working class life art. Kollwitz became a socialist as a young woman and lived in a working class neighborhood, where her husband was the local doctor.
Her early drawings, so tightly rendered and finely detailed that a magnifying glass accompanies them, tell stories of conflict, exploitation, and galvanization. The Weavers and Peasant War, her defining series of this period, were narratives inspired by an 1844 weavers’ revolt in Silesia and the infamous 1524 German Peasants’ War, which another German socialist, Friedrich Engels had influentially compared to the 1848 revolutions which had rocked Europe twenty years before Kollwitz’s birth. These series are highly accessible. In contrast to a static, heroic portrayal of conflict, we read their cyclical movement from inciting grief and rage, to communal unrest, to action, and occasionally, back to defeat. They unfold narratively, like Dickens novels, from which Kollwitz drew inspiration. Their look— that of nineteenth century social novels— underscores the engaging popular appeal that aided in their emphatic agitation for social change.
To convey these themes, the exhibit centers Kollwitz’s repeated portrayal of women’s hands. The curators include her preliminary sketches as she works through changes in the positioning of these women’s hands, thus altering the meaning of the drawings. In doing so, we become aware of both the affective importance of her subjects’ hands and of Kollwitz’s hand as the artist. In The Weavers, a woman passive in the face of a dead revolutionary carried across the threshold of her home moves, as the accompanying text notes, from “resignation to rage” as Kollwitz transforms the woman’s hands, which lie limply at her side in the first draft into tight fists by her next sketch. In Peasant War, Kollwitz makes studies of Black Anna’s hands, a peasant leader of the war, with whom the exhibit suggests Kollwitz might have identified. Black Anna’s hands are muscular and curved inward, exhorting her army forward. Hands here, both Kollwitz’s and her subjects’, are symbols of thought. Kollwitz allows us to see these women’s inner lives and their roles in shaping the events taking place around them. Similarly, the curators illustrate Kollwitz’s artistic labor and thought as she goes about creating these scenes, or, to invoke Frazier, constructing “monuments for workers’ thoughts.”
If we understand these exhibits as a pair, they offer us a view, implicitly and explicitly, into the layered forms of work within these shows. They obviously engage with ideas of working class subjecthood and exploitation. Simultaneously, they highlight the cultural labor of the artist at work, and, tacitly, through their very existence, the curatorial and museum work behind their conception and execution. At its most literal, the Frazier exhibit was put on by UAW members about UAW members. In a challenge to how we might simplistically understand labor, for instance as solely industrial, these exhibits, in their layered examination of work offer a multi-faceted understanding of what work can mean. Much like the early 1970s when the Lordstown autoworkers and the MoMA workers turned toward labor organizing to anchor their material concerns alongside more abstract needs, such as fulfillment, recognition, and purpose, the exhibits suggest Frazier and Kollwitz’s art— art that is about thought — is fundamentally social. They demand both an aesthetic and collective engagement, an interaction between the viewer, the artist, the exhibit, the subjects, and the ideas. This web of connection generates something active, an optimistic interrelation of art and labor that is, in earnest, solidaristic.