Landscapes of Loss at Lordstown: LaToya Ruby Frazier Depicts Suburban Deindustrialization
What does deindustrialization look like? For many in the United States, it's long been synonymous with urban decay and abandonment: vacant skyscrapers and lofts, rusty rail lines, "feral" bungalows, and boarded up tenements. It looks, in short, like Camilo José Vergara's American Ruins (1999), or the "ruin porn" of Andrew Moore, Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre, and James Griffioen that circulated like so much clickbait a decade ago.
Today, though, postindustrial America is, like so much else in the land of sprawl, suburban. Manufacturing began to leave cities for cheaper land, labor, and transportation in the 1920s. During and after World War II, the shift accelerated. And naturally, many of those plants have since closed, generating a new geography of loss. Rarely, though, is it depicted. The urban edge remains fused in the public imagination with growth, prosperity, and newness, never mind the data to the contrary.
Figure 1. Sherria Duncan (23 years at Lordtown), Jason Duncan (19 years at Lordstown), Jason Duncan (17 years at Lordstown), at home with family, Austintown, Ohio, 2019. Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Monuments of Solidarity, Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner.
Figure 2. Kesha Scales (22 years at Lordstown) at home, Youngstown, Ohio, 2019. Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Monuments of Solidarity, Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner.
Enter LaToya Ruby Frazier. Born in 1982, during the first great wave of deindustrialization in the U.S., Frazier grew up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, outside Pittsburgh, in the shadow of Andrew Carnegie's Edgar Thompson Steel Works, which opened in 1873. As a teenager, in the early 2000s, Frazier picked up a camera and began photographing herself, her family, and her environment, which had suffered for decades as steel manufacturing diminished. In the 2010s, she broadened her lens to other centers of blue-collar distress such as Flint, Michigan, during its water crisis. In 2019, she trained it on Lordstown, Ohio.
Just outside Youngstown, Ohio, and midway between Pittsburgh and Cleveland, Lordstown was primarily agricultural until after World War II, when state highway engineers routed the Ohio Turnpike (today also Interstate 80) through it. The year the road was completed, 1955, General Motors began buying up farmland there in anticipation of a new plant. Eleven years later, it opened Lordstown Assembly, producing Chevrolets and Pontiacs. For decades, it employed thousands. But in 2006 GM began to shed shifts and jobs. During the economically lean years of the first Obama administration (2009-13), the company retooled the complex to build inexpensive compact cars, namely the Chevy Cruze and variants. But by 2018, with Americans mostly buying trucks and SUVs, GM announced that Lordstown would be "unallocated": no models would be built there going forward. All the workers would be fired and the plant mothballed.
Figure 3. "The Last Cruze" photos arranged in groups of three. Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Monuments of Solidarity, Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner.
Figure 4. Left: Trisha Amato (11 years at Lordstown) with boyfriend and children at home, Poland, Ohio, 2019; right: UAW monthly meeting at union hall, Lordstown, Ohio, 2019. Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Monuments of Solidarity, Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner.
Frazier arrived on the scene just in time for the last Cruze to roll off the line. Working "in solidarity" with two trade union chapters, the United Auto Workers Locals 1112 and 1714, she met with workers on site and in their union halls. She took workers’ photos, often as individual and group portraits. And she recorded their stories, many of which are presented in rich text panels. Then she followed them home. The result, "The Last Cruze," tells a new, twenty-first century story about industrial — and postindustrial — landscapes. First exhibited in 2019 at the University of Chicago and published as a book in 2020, the project is now on view at New York's Museum of Modern Art through September 7, 2024 as part of the exhibition Monuments of Solidarity, the first museum survey of the artist-activist's work.
Figure 5. "The Last Cruze" installed on a custom rack resembling an assembly line. Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Monuments of Solidarity, Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner.
Occupying a single long gallery, "The Last Cruze" elicits a visceral response. All but three photos are arranged in trios in on a massive rack, a "monument to the working-class people in this country" in Frazier's telling, custom built for the 2019 show, that evokes twenty-one gantry cranes straddling an assembly line. The rack is painted "international orange," a red-tinted primer used by manufacturers to protect steel, and common in many industrial settings.
Figure 6. David Green, UAW Local 1112 president (24 years at Lordstown) in his parents' living room, Girard, Ohio, 2019. Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Monuments of Solidarity, Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner.
Figure 7. Left: Ernie Long (11 years at Lordstown) with wife in front of their new custom-built house, Highland Township, Ohio, 2019; right: Brandie Long (8 years at Lordtown) with her brother at home, Highland Township, Ohio, 2019. Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Monuments of Solidarity, Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner.
A few images set the overall scene: cars on the shop floor and on a surface parking lot awaiting shipment; workers protesting in front of a company mural ("Lordstown: Home of the Cruze"). Mostly, though, Frazier leads the viewer into the private realm: the domestic lives of the workers. Unlike most images of industrial decline, these don't betray immiseration. This isn't a world of broken glass, rust, and weeds — at least not yet. To the contrary, it’s one of suburban order and abundance: tidy houses (owner-occupied and customized), with tidy porches and tidy lawns. Workers — Black, Latino, and White — pose, some stoic, some with tears, alongside their children, parents, and pets, in well-appointed kitchens and living rooms, surrounded by the trappings of middle-class American comfort, from chandeliers to taxidermy.
Figure 8. Houses across from Lordstown, Warren, Ohio, 2019. Installation view of LaToya Ruby Frazier, Monuments of Solidarity, Museum of Modern Art, 2024. Photograph by Matthew Gordon Lasner.
Of all these portentous images, the most revealing is not one of a family, of protesting workers, or of the plant. It is an aerial view of a neighborhood, in Warren, Ohio, just across the Turnpike from Lordstown Assembly. Apart from the factory in the background, the place looks much like any postwar U.S. suburb, with single-family houses on a grid of streets with gentle curves to reduce feelings of monotony. Snow covers the ground and the trees are bare. But even the bleakness of winter can't mask the fact that this is a classic, even stereotypical, "middle landscape." A little bit city, a little bit country, it could be Levittown, New York, Lakewood, California, or myriad subdivisions in between. It is the kind of space that in the postwar U.S. was never just the preserve of white-collar professionals and managers, but somewhere attainable to all with stable, unionized employment.
And today? It is how deindustrialization looks: a landscape of repose, built at a time of plenty, masking a reality of precarity and devastation.
Citation
Matthew Gordon Lasner, "Landscapes of Loss at Lordstown: LaToya Ruby Frazier Depicts Suburban Deindustrialization," PLATFORM, June 3, 2024.
