‘Frame of Reference’ Exhibit Begins With a Gallery Talk This Saturday

Documentary and lifestyle photographer April Frazier will open a new exhibit, “Frame of Reference,” at the Fayette Heritage Museum and Archives with a gallery talk at 11 a.m. on Saturday, May 21. Frazier will discuss her 20-year journey of discovery of her African-American roots, which led back six generations to rural Muldoon in Fayette County.

The exhibit comes to La Grange after a five-month showing at the Houston Museum of African American Culture. Using photographic images and historical evidence, Ms. Frazier takes a journey through time and reflects on memories and experiences within her family history. Overarching themes of connectedness, accomplishment, and every day Black life flow through the installation.

Photographs from her personal archive date as early as the 1890s through 1950s, and include formal portraits and candid images of family life. Frazier’s own images of the landscape near Muldoon, including the road that led to where her family lived, worked and died, continue the visual narrative.

Collages in the exhibit carve out details of those lives lived and highlight certain triumphs, including Emanuel Roberts, Frazier’s second great-grandfather and his acquisition of one hundred acres in Wharton County, Texas in 1893, and Henry Cox, her third great-grandfather, whose parents Jacob Cox and Malissa Truesdale married as freedmen in Fayette County in January 1866. Frazier and her father used cedar from Muldoon to make a frame for a photograph of her great-grandmother, Mollie Burton, who is buried in Fayette County’s Cedar Creek Cemetery.

According to Frazier, the threading across the installation signifies connections to family ties and was derived from observing the thread pattern on the back of a family photo collection sewn together by her grandmother.

It is her hope that the exhibit will help others realize the worth and importance in recording their own family histories.

The Frame of Reference exhibit will remain on display until Aug. 27 in the Fayette Heritage Museum and Archives, 855 S. Jefferson St., La Grange.