Celebrated American photographer LaToya Ruby Frazier’s first out of doors artwork set up, “The Liberty Portraits: A Monument to the 2024 Champions” (2024–25), has been mounted within the plaza outdoors of Barclays Middle in Brooklyn, New York. The set up, which was unveiled on July third, options monumental portraits of 10 members of the 2024 roster of New York’s WNBA staff, the Liberty. The Liberty prevailed over the Minnesota Lynx within the WNBA Finals final yr, marking the staff’s first championship win in franchise historical past.
Frazier is finest identified for work that mixes documentary images, portraiture, and textual content to inform tales about communities dealing with environmental and financial devastation. Her collaboration with the Liberty was spurred by Clara Wu Tsai, the staff’s co-owner and a distinguished artwork collector. Beforehand, the inspiration Wu Tsai runs along with her husband, Joe Tsai, had commissioned a everlasting, site-specific set up by Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan for the plaza outdoors Barclays Middle.
“I’ve been a WNBA and Liberty fan for the reason that franchise was based in 1997 and it’s at all times been a dream to collaborate,” stated Frazier in a press assertion. “This collaboration extends past fandom and the spectacle of sport; it’s an act of celebrating and bearing witness to the total humanity of those championship gamers—their struggles, their triumphs, their lives outdoors the sector.”
The ten featured gamers are every represented with two pictures: one close-up portrait depicting the participant in uniform, and one other depicting her with members of the family. Every portrait is accompanied by a first-person account from a beloved one highlighting noteworthy moments from the participant’s profession. Among the many gamers that Frazier photographed are ahead Breanna Stewart, pictured along with her spouse, Marta Xargay Casademont; guard Sabrina Ionescu, pictured along with her husband, Hroniss Grasu; and middle Jonquel Jones, pictured with members of her household within the Bahamas, the place she was born and raised.
The set up will stay on view throughout the 2025 season. Wu Tsai has deliberate further artwork commissions for 2026 and past, chosen by a jury of distinguished artwork world figures together with Studio Museum director Thelma Golden, LACMA director Michael Govan, and Serpentine Galleries inventive director Hans Ulrich Obrist.
