Frazier first gained notice in a 2015 MacArthur genius award for a series she titled The Notion of Family, portraying herself, her mother and grandmother within the larger context of America’s industrial decline.
She grew up in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once thriving town where Andrew Carnegie built his first steel mill, now in economic distress. Her museum retrospective begins there, enhanced with silent videos, and a wall installation, a kind of poem listing various toxins found in Braddock’s air.
She shows the closing of a major medical center, and her response through art to a Levi Strauss ad campaign that used her town as a setting for so-called urban pioneers and featured a tagline that read, “Go forth.” Frazier asked, “Go forth where?”
