Amy Reidel. Tumor Storm, 2016; loose glitter and colored sand on printed vinyl; dimensions vary. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: David Johnson Photography.

Several pieces are peppered along the hallway that runs from the entrance of the Nancy Spirtas Kranzberg Gallery within the Sheldon. Some are displayed independently, while others are clustered together. In Puking Roses (2016), fake roses are arranged in single file on a wall, vomiting tinsel that hangs like ringlets of green snot. Reidel’s grandmother is loosely painted on an irregularly shaped piece of canvas tacked to the wall in Pink Grandma and Kleenex Crown (2016). The subject’s hair is fluorescent pink and adorned with crumpled tissues and fake flowers. Two small assemblages, titled Tumors (2016), are beautiful conglomerations of handmade geodes, crystals, fake flowers, shredded snapshots, tinsel, and cut paintings. The works’ title and context shifts their beauty, and they become sinister knickknacks. One rests on a white shelf; the other hangs above like a Christmas ornament.

Halfway down the hallway, and to the right, a wide doorway opens to another part of the gallery, which is divided into three sections. Each one of these rooms has its own installation. In the center space, a large mandala of loose glitter and colored sand is composed with painstaking precision on a low, broad platform. The design of this work, Tumor Storm (2016), is roundish, asymmetrical, and organic—a composite of a colored MRI scan and weather radar. Multiple colors clash and complement each other as distinct shapes edge against one another.

Amy Riedel. Tumors, 2016; homemade geodes, crystals, fake flowers, shredded photos, tulle, tinsel, string, cut paintings, hanging wire, hot glue; dimensions vary. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Amy Reidel.

There is tension between Reidel’s resplendent materials and foreboding subject matter. Her use of glitter in particular adds whimsy to the work, while providing a response to her mother’s illness. Anyone who has worked with glitter knows that it gets everywhere. It trails behind you and sticks on your person days after you’ve come into contact with it. In other words, glitter spreads like a disease, making it an appropriate—albeit humorous—medium for Reidel to work with. Like the sand mandalas made by Tibetan Buddhists, Tumor Storm is temporary, and the intricate installation will be swept away at the end of its showing—a somber reminder of life’s transience.

Amy Reidel. Radar Home, 11.8.13, 2016; installation view, the Sheldon. Audrey Wig, 2016; friendship bracelets, ribbon, sequins, fake flowers on styrofoam wig stand; dimensions vary. View From a Room, 2016; acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas with velour; dimensions vary. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: David Johnson Photography.

In the next room, a wig made of friendship bracelets and ribbons, Audrey Wig (2016), rests on a Styrofoam head covered with sequins and two blue, fake flower eyes. Reidel’s friends made the bracelets at her request, and the artist added burgundy ribbons to raise awareness of multiple myeloma. Fabricating a wig from these, Reidel honors those undergoing cancer treatments and their resulting hair loss. Nearby, an abstract painting, View From a Room (2016), hangs behind navy-blue velour curtains. Multiple layers obfuscate any discernible image, although horizontal stripes of golden, stenciled spray paint suggest blinds.

In the darkened back corner of the last gallery, a compilation of home videos from the early ’90s is projected on a wall. Footage of family gatherings is layered and paired with a solo piano arrangement of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” performed by Steve Valli specifically for the video. Personal recordings are interspersed—Reidel’s grandmother breathing with an oxygen mask during her last hours and her family’s conversation and laughter at the meal after she passed, among others. Beneath these is the methodical “beep…beep…beep…” of a heart monitor—another solemn reminder of mortality. The video evokes a sense of melancholy as Reidel shares fond memories of loved ones.

Amy Reidel. Radar Home, 11.8.13, 2016; installation view, the Sheldon, St. Louis. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: David Johnson Photography.

Radar Home, 11.8.13 is brave, and this bravery makes up for its formal disparities. Reidel’s works reflect the messy experience of a loved one fighting a terminal illness. She allows access to intimate, painful, and sometimes awkwardly personal moments that many would keep bottled up inside. Several works are gorgeous, some are a little grotesque, and the exhibition feels therapeutic—for Reidel, her family and friends, and for viewers. Some may appreciate the works’ beauty and humor elicited through colorful and dazzling craft materials that are both lush and tacky. Others might be moved by its sincerity and heartfelt content. For Reidel, Radar Home, 11.8.13 seems to be about overcoming obstacles and accepting those that cannot be overcome—remaining productive, creative, and positive during moments of emotional distress.

Amy Reidel: Radar Home, 11.8.13 will be on view at the Sheldon Art Galleries in St. Louis through January 14, 2017.

Photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier makes her New York solo debut with A Haunted Capital, a tightly crafted, personal-is-political installation at the Brooklyn Museum. The artist’s hometown of Braddock, a forgotten steel mill town in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, is marked by a geography of postindustrial degradation. An outsider might take a social documentary approach to Braddock’s history and current woes. As an insider, Frazier documents that history’s tangible impact on her own and her family’s lives―an impact characterized by environmental illness, institutionalized racism, and disparity in access to health care―and her community’s pride and tenacity.  Documentary-style photographs of the demolition of Braddock Hospital, the only hospital in the area, are juxtaposed with intimate portraits of Frazier’s mother and grandmother, both of whom learned they had cancer in 2008. (A link is implied between Braddock’s environment and these illnesses, as well as Frazier’s lupus.) Framed gelatin silver prints of Frazier, her mother, grandmother, grandfather, and family friends, taken in Braddock at various points between 2002 and 2011, line the two white walls of the installation space along with carefully selected cityscapes. The end walls are wallpapered with dozens of images, a visual archive Frazier has gathered of Braddock’s history, one that is inclusive of African Americans. This was done in response to her realization that African Americans were excluded from a 2008 history of the town, Braddock, Allegheny County. “In the face of this and other exclusions, I have a strong sense of duty to visually write my family and community into the history of Braddock,” she says. [1]

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Momme Portrait Series (Shadow), 2008. Gelatin silver photograph, 15 1/2 x 19 1/2 in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund; © LaToya Ruby Frazier

Frazier’s portraits hover between staged and intimate. In Shadow (2008), the artist’s profile overlaps with her mother’s body; together they cast an ominous shadow that acts as a third persona that, the artist reveals, “foreshadows the loss of Grandma Ruby.” Grandma Ruby, Mom, and Me (2009) was taken at Frazier’s grandmother’s open casket. Frazier’s photographs, including some that are part of this show, are arrayed around the casket, while the artist looks out at the camera with a mixture of loss, self-assurance, and defiance. The snapshot Mr. Jim Kidd (2011), which shows a man protesting the hospital’s destruction, is overshadowed by the finality of a photograph of the destroyed hospital and its empty parking lot dusted with snow. The man’s handwritten sign reads: “UPMC is race-based, class-based health care.”

Frazier’s influences range from Jacob Riis, Lewis Hine, and Farm Security Administration photographers to self-portraitists Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun, as well as cultural theorists bell hooks and Michele Wallace and urban geographer David Harvey, all of whom she cites as part of her “artistic family lineage.” Indeed, her show reads at times like a self-representation of a social self rather than a psychic one. “Grandma Ruby, Mom, and I have all been shaped by external forces,” the artist reflects. “On the micro level, we are three women from an abandoned community, but on the macro level, I see us as symbolic of state oppression and neglect,” she is quoted as saying in the exhibition brochure. Frazier credits the Community Art Practice class she took with Carrie Mae Weems at Syracuse University as having propelled her to investigate class, race, and capitalism. Her distinction is in how she demonstrates the imprint of these forces on herself and her close family members, allowing observer and observed to merge. In this melding of oppression and self-investigation―particularly in her attention to environmental illness–Frazier’s work recalls that of British photographer Jo Spence, who charted her own position within a rigid class system and, later, her status as a cancer patient. Spence’s self-representation emerged from Marxist class analysis into a technique she called “photo therapy,” which she developed with collaborators, thereby demystifying her auteur status as photographer.

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Grandma Ruby and Me, 2005. Gelatin silver photograph, 15 1/2 x 18 1/2 in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund © LaToya Ruby Frazier

Collaboration is key to Frazier’s practice, as well. In a self-portrait with her mother, Huxtables, Mom and Me (2009), Frazier wears an old Cosby Show T-shirt. She describes how her mother set up the camera “in the bedroom doorway, facing a mirror reflecting part of her image. Both the mirror and T-shirt are scratched, dusty, and fading.” The promise of the idealized African American TV family pales in comparison to the reality of Frazier’s family life.  In a lecture she performed at the museum, with her images projected in the background, she said, “Between my background and my foreground, I am not sure where I stand.” This hovering between real and imagined, background and foreground, in both the spatial and the social senses, marks Frazier’s work.

LaToya Ruby Frazier. Huxtables, Mom and Me, 2009. Gelatin silver photograph, 15 x 19 1/4 in. Brooklyn Museum, Emily Winthrop Miles Fund, 2011.63.3.© LaToya Ruby Frazier

LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs function as evidence of her refusal to remain invisible. Avoiding digital manipulation or technical flourishes, she marshals photography’s innate ability to create visibility–an indelible visual record–for the marginalized and oppressed, in the service of critiquing social welfare institutions.

LaToya Ruby Frazier: A Haunted Capital is on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art through Aug. 11, 2013.

[1] LaToya Ruby Frazier, interview with Rujeko Hockley, assistant curator of contemporary art, Brooklyn Museum, from exhibition brochure.

Liena Vayzman is an art historian, critic, and curator based in New York. She earned her PhD in the History of Art at Yale University, completing a dissertation on French Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun. Recent publications include “I’d Rather Be Here and Now:  The Performative Verb of Painting – An Interview with Anoka Faroqee” in X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, and “Farm Fresh Art: Food, Art, Politics, and the Blossoming of Social Practice” in Art Practical.

#Hashtags is a series exploring the intersection of art, social issues, and global politics.