Me and Mom's Boyfriend, Mr. Art, 2005

Latoya Ruby Frazier’s work The Notion of Family, of which this lot is a part, reads like a personal family album, but one to which the whole world has access. Documenting her family for over a decade beginning at the age of 16, she tells the story of three generations of black women so inextricably tied to their hometown of Braddock, they reflect its history like a mirror. In this project, Frazier does not only make comment on the economic decline and environmental wounds left on a postindustrial town of mostly poor black inhabitants, she inserts black women into this narrative. Poetically, she also reveals their humanity, showing the very familiar dynamics of family life.

Me and Mom's Boyfriend, Mr. Art, from 2005, offered here, is not a typical family album photo for it gives an interior private view that would not normally be photographed.  We peer into a cross-section of two interiors, Frazier sits disgruntled on her bed and a man, Mr. Art her mother’s boyfriend, lay on the bed watching television. Although separate, Mr. Art’s presence seems to sadden Frazier. “Mom’s boyfriend, Mr. Art, was my rival for Mom’s affection” Frazier laments in text printed beneath the published image in the 2014 book A Notion of Family. Frazier cleverly interweaves within a multi-layered critique of postindustrial environmental issues, gentrification and racism, the relatable complexities of parent child relationships, a young girl yearning for the affections of her mother.

This intimate double portrait is published in Frazier’s 2014 book A Notion of Family and is among her works that earned her the highly esteemed MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 2015. This image is found in the collection of The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge. Latoya Ruby Frazier is an Associate Professor of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.