The artist who protested John Fetterman’s $55 million Braddock ad campaign

Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier grew up in Braddock, Pa., a Pittsburgh suburb that developed around the Edgar Thomson Steel Works, founded by Andrew Carnegie in 1874. Like many steel mill towns, Braddock flourished for a while and then quickly declined with the steel industry in the 1980s.

Frazier grew up at the height of the War on Drugs in the 1980s, among shuttered steel mills and around adults with chronic illnesses caused by the heavy industrialization and its toxic waste. Her mother and grandmother both had cancer, and Frazier, who was born in 1982, lives with the chronic autoimmune disease lupus.

When she was 16, Frazier started photographing her family. Collaborating with her mother, Cynthia, and grandmother Ruby, she created a series of intimate and very tender images called “The Notion of Family,” which is included in her career retrospective exhibition Monuments of Solidarity at New York’s Museum of Modern Art through Sept. 7.

“Latoya never works in a vacuum, [her work] is all about relations and systems, and so that early collaboration with her mother being at the very base of her practice, [is] the way that she thinks about all her [future] work,” said Caitlin Ryan, assistant curator of the museum’s photography department and the show’s cocurator.

Among the dozens of photographs in the series, there is one of Frazier’s grandmother in 2007 standing in front of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center Braddock hospital, where she used to go for her checkups. “We used to live down the hill because the hospital sat on a steep hill. So if you lived in The Bottom, you had to climb up to get to the hospital,” Frazier said to The Inquirer.

Grandma Ruby died from pancreatic cancer in 2009. The next year, the hospital shut down because of a continued revenue shortfall.

UPMC, Frazier said, wasn’t just the town’s crucial health care provider but its largest employer.

In the same year, Braddock, whose then-mayor was Pennsylvania U.S. Sen. John Fetterman, appeared in a Levi’s multimedia brand campaign that cost, per an NPR report, $55 million. Produced by the ad agency Wieden+Kennedy, the Levi’s ads used Braddock as the face of their new campaign — presenting itself to be a new frontier waiting to be conquered and rebuilt. Braddock residents were paid to appear as models. The jeans company in return donated toward a community center and a new playground downtown.

“Ninety percent of our town is in a landfill somewhere,” Fetterman said in an ad for the “Ready for Work” campaign. “So reinvention is our only option.”

Even before the campaign, Frazier was documenting the decline of the town and its people “because this was not headline news,” she said. “The Levi’s ads present a fiction, and I am using my artistic work and platform to really depict reality.”

While Fetterman was offering $1 studios in Braddock to artists, Frazier’s documentation served as an act of responsibility toward other artists. “Look, you’re not simply moving here. You’re getting a studio for $1, but you’re literally moving into an environmental catastrophe, a manmade environmental situation which kills indiscriminately. You need to be aware of the toxicity and the pollution that is here.”

The Levi’s campaign slogan stated, “Everybody’s Work Is Equally Important.” Frazier’s series of photographs and lithographs made in response to the campaign is a retort: “If Everybody’s Work is Equally Important?”

The campaign told people to “Go Forth to Work.” Frazier had one question in response: “I would like to know, go forth to where? How can we go forth when our borough’s buses and ambulances have been cut?”

“This body of work … situates Braddock [being sold] as a kind of new frontier, and LaToya responding to the language of advertising, to the history of industrialization, and the dissonance between imaginary Braddock,” Ryan said.

One of the ad images — of a young white man, an “urban pioneer,” clad in denim — makes its way into a suite of lithographs Frazier created for the community campaign to save the Braddock hospital. “This representation … omits the fact that Braddock, Pa., is a 19th century industrial town that has been abandoned by our government since the Reagan era,” Frazier notes in the lithograph, referring to the presidency of Ronald Reagan from 1981 to 1989.

“It looks like he was cleaning the Monongahela River. I just think this is so irresponsible and insidious,” Frazier said.

In 2012, a PennEnvironment report ranked the river as the 17th-most-toxic river in the country, with 2.6 million pounds of toxic discharges.

“It also showed a kid standing next to a horse. I got into a helicopter to make two images,” she said, referring to the photographs “Former Braddock Hospital Site” (2013) and “Edgar Thomson Plant and The Bottom” (2013). “They show you the landscape. We don’t own horses in Braddock.”

When the ads started appearing on billboards throughout New York City in 2011, Frazier was part of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. With artist Liz Magic Laser, she staged a performance protest, the video of which is also a part of the exhibit.

“Braddock is the one of the most toxic places in America,” she says in the video. Dressed in denim, Frazier mimes the movement of steel workers and rubs her clothes against Manhattan sidewalks, standing in front of a temporary Levi’s Photo Workshop in SoHo. Inside the workshop, Frazier said, “There were pictures that they had of Braddock, mounted as photo booths.”

In the performance, she rubs herself against the sidewalk until all her clothes tear and fray, destroying the Levi’s jackets and jeans she has been wearing. She stands posing the same question she asks in her lithographs: “Do we really need $50 jeans and $250 trucker jackets when we don’t have medical care?”

When the performance first showed at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Frazier said there were efforts to shut it down. The museum director then, Eric Shiner, refused to remove the work, she said.

In another accompanying piece of art in the same series, “Who Gets To Go Forth? (Demystifying the Myth of the ‘Urban Pioneer,’” Frazier takes a Levi’s billboard and prints the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s quote about advertisements on it: “Advertisers have long since learned that most people are soft-minded, and they capitalize on this susceptibility with skillful and effective slogans,” a part of it reads.

“And so that becomes the message for that piece,” Frazier said. “I am an artist in the 21st century that stands in the gap between working-class and creative-class communities. To do this show was literally to unite the art world, the working class, and the general public. There is a difference between those three spaces, and in particular, the people who are featured in my work, that I worked with, they are not used to being invited to a museum, and see themselves heralded and celebrated and honored on its walls.”

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Monuments of Solidarity” continues through Sept. 7, 2024, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 11 W. 53rd St. (between Fifth and Sixth Avenues). Information: moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5574