Shea at work driving bus 38, Route 45 for Flint Community Schools Transportation, First Student Co. from the series: Flint is Family

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Shea at work driving bus 38, Route 45 for Flint Community Schools Transportation, First Student Co. from the series: Flint is Family

Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier American, Born 1982

Date2016-17

Dimensions24 × 20 in. (61 × 50.8 cm)

MediumGelatin silver print

ClassificationPhotographs

Credit LinePurchased with funds from the Libbey Endowment, Gift of Edward Drummond Libbey

Object number

2019.63

Not on View

Published ReferencesReisenfeld, Robin, Life is a Highway: Art and American Car Culture, Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art, 2019, p. 70, 72, repr.

Kahn, Mattie, “Flint is Family” in Elle Magazine, September 2016, repr. Link to resource

Exhibition HistoryNew York, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, LaToya Ruby Frazier, January 15– February 25, 2018.

Toledo, Toledo Museum of Art, Life is a Highway: Art and American Car Culture, June 15 – September 15, 2019.

Miami, Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at FIU; New Orleans, Newcomb Art Museum of Tulane University, Flint is Family, 2019 – 2020.

Label TextLaToya Ruby Frazier’s images of the Cobb family from her Flint is Family photographic series illustrates car culture’s ambivalent position as both a family’s means of support and the instigator of its breakup. The series is a searing visual narrative that charts the personal resilience of a multi-generational family who confronts economic hardship, multiple health conditions, and a frayed social fabric due to the shuttering of General Motors’ industrial complex and the lead water crisis in Flint, Michigan. Frazier’s photos document Shea Cobb’s struggle to support herself and her family as an elementary school bus driver and her decision to ultimately leave behind her family home to move to Mississippi with her daughter to live on her father’s horse ranch.