Save Our Community Hospital Analysis

LaToya Ruby Frazier is exhausted. She flew in from Braddock, Pa. to Chicago at the crack of dawn to speak at the Art Institute of Chicago in front of a packed crowd. Today is painless compared to the previous 365 days. She reflects on her weeks in Flint, Mich. where she documented Flint's horrific water crisis. The tragedy in Flint exposed thousands of children to high levels of lead. Back in her hometown of Braddock, Frazier's spent the last month around the clock at the local hospital by her mother’s side in the intensive care unit. "I go where I'm called," Frazier says, glaring up from her phone. She slouches in her chair, dark brown bags under her eyes from the night before. Frazier's work in art and advocacy is deeply personal. Her photography exhibit in 2012, "Campaign for Braddock Hospital (Save our Community Hospital)," addresses the struggle for economic opportunity and health care by Braddock residents. She shows me printed black-and-white photographs from the project of resident protests outside the demolished hospital in Braddock. They're all fighting for the same thing: equal, fair treatment from the system. The project also includes old ads from a campaign by Levi's that Frazier repurposed and transformed to reveal the devastating truth about Braddock's industrial history. People in Rust Belt …show more content…
Three of the four films are unequivocally about race in America. Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro, Ava DuVernay’s 13th, and Ezra Edelman’s O.J: Made in America. The three directors weave concepts of police brutality, past and present racism, and the black experience. Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro draws from James Baldwin’s unfinished manuscript Remember This House. The story explores modern racism through Baldwin’s friends in the Civil Rights Movement, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Peck describes making the film as a response to his