The Houston Museum of African American Culture (HMAAC) is delighted to present April Frazier’s Frame of Reference Installation, December 3, 2021 through March 5, 2022.

The installation is the artist’s photographic journey through time; her reflection on memories and experiences from her family history. With photographs from as early as 1890 to the present, Frame of Reference serves as recognition of the sacrifice and overarching love shown over time that is at the foundation of black families’ accomplishments and survival. The installation begins the museum's emphasis on black families that includes school and neighborhood programming.

The installation includes portraits from Black Chronicles on loan from Autograph, the London based photographic art institution directed by Mark Sealy MBE, that will be displayed in parallel to Frazier’s work. She uses 16 portraits from Black Chronicles to correspond with images in Frame of Reference to show the universal beauty, style and significance of AfriDescent peoples, and to document black dignity and strength across oceans. As a curated body of work, the addition of these photographs in Frame of Reference contributes to an ongoing process of redressing structural absence within the historical record.

According to HMAAC CEO John Guess, Jr., “We see Frazier’s installation as helping HMAAC to drive home to local individuals and institutions, particularly in neighborhoods of color, the need to see our communities as places worthy of having family histories, and by extension, the need to document neighborhood communities. This is of great interest to HMAAC.”

HMAAC Board President Cindy Miles sees Frazier’s work “as freeing family historians like myself to engage in conversation on ways to insure the fabric of family that is so crucial to our identity, is shared as a means of underscoring our common experience in America.”

Frame of Reference is generously sponsored by the Houston Endowment, HEB, and the Board of Directors of the Houston Museum of African American Culture.

April M. Frazier is a documentary and lifestyle photographer from Houston, TX. She is a graduate of Prairie View A&M University receiving a BBA in Management Information Systems and Rice University, with a Master of Business Administration. April worked in Oil & Gas for fifteen years in various Information Technology roles, including a 10-month expat position in Hamburg, Germany. In 2011, April launched her photography business and has since served clients in all genres specializing in collaboration with minority and women owned businesses in Houston.

Her personal photography projects include architectural and documentary images from her European and Caribbean travel with extensive focus on Jamaica. Her most prized and ongoing work involves research and documentation of her ancestral roots in Texas through the creation of imagery on lands with an identified familial connection from the time of enslavement to present day. Her photographic work has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Oregon, and Texas, along with a group exhibition in London.