PORTRAIT OF HOME - Braddock Pennsylvania

"MacArthur Fellow LaToya Ruby Frazier captures the town that survived" PBS NewsHour 1/5/2016

Excerpt

SUMMARY:  Braddock, Pennsylvania, was once a thriving steel town before the town’s industry collapsed.  It's where LaToya Ruby Frazier grew up, like her mother and grandmother before her, and it's where the visual artist and 2015 MacArthur fellow has returned to document the change her community has endured.  Jeffrey Brown talks with Frazier about her art and activism.

JUDY WOODRUFF (NewsHour):  Finally, a look at a photographer’s more-than-decade-long project documenting hope and despair in her hometown.

Jeffrey Brown has that story.

JEFFREY BROWN (NewsHour):  Braddock, Pennsylvania, about nine miles outside of Pittsburgh, a once thriving steel town of some 20,000, now down to one-tenth of that, and captured through the very personal lens of LaToya Ruby Frazier, the 32-year-old winner of one of this year’s MacArthur Fellowships.

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER, Photographer:  I see myself as an artist and a citizen that’s documenting and telling the story and building the archive of working-class families facing all this change that’s happening, because it has to be documented.

JEFFREY BROWN:  These days, Frazier teaches and lives in Chicago, where we talked to her, but her true home, her childhood home, is the one found in her work.

It’s a project titled “The Notion of Family” that she began more than a decade ago, documenting three generations of African-American women in a particular time and place.

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER:  My grandmother, who grew up there in the ’30s, when Braddock was prosperous and a city itself that everyone came to, to my mother growing up there in the ’60s during segregation and white flight and the beginning of the collapse of the steel industry, to myself growing up there in the ’80s and ’90s, when the factories were already dismantled and the war on drugs kind of hit its peak.

JEFFREY BROWN:  Educator and photographer Lewis Hine used his camera for social reform.  Photographers from the Farm Security Administration documented the poverty of the Depression, the pioneering work of Gordon Parks in the 1940s and ’50s.

Frazier sees herself working in this tradition, first and foremost, though, as a visual artist.

LATOYA RUBY FRAZIER:  The art comes in with how it’s crafted, how it’s made, the material, me understanding the history, because the images, they’re not purely documents.

If you look at them, first and foremost, the fact that I appear on the other side of the camera lets you know that this is contemporary art, because now I’m performing and doing gestures in front of the camera to create…

ART BEAT - Soul Singer Charles Bradley, With Hugs

"Soul Singer Charles Bradley Breaks Loose" by Margaret Myers, PBS Newshour 4/24/2013

If you go to a Charles Bradley concert, prepare to get hugged...by Charles Bradley.  He does it every time.  After the show -- after the screaming and the sweat -- he steps down from the stage, arms outstretched, and embraces the audience one by one.  I got a hug.  Video editor Josh Barajas got one, too.

"When I go on stage and I see the audience, see the way they love me, the way they give me love, it's a love that you carry inside you," the 64-year-old soul singer said before a recent performance in Annapolis, Md.  "It makes you want to open every bit of love you carry inside you.  It's a beautiful feeling."

Bradley's story is far from beautiful.  His mother was absent for most of his upbringing.  He left home at 14 and spent time living on the street and in subway trains in New York.  It was then that he found Job Corps, the vocational training program created in 1964 as part of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and earned work as a cook.  It was also around this time that he got to see James Brown perform.

"When I got a chance, when I was 14, to go see James Brown...that just enhanced my singing," he said.  "And when I went to Job Corps, I finally met my first band.  I could sing.  They wanted me to sing.  But I was a little nervous being around a big crowd.  But once you get that mic in your hand, it gets in your spirit, you just break loose."

A soul singer was born.

But it took nearly a half-century before the masses would get to hear his music.  Bradley was in his 50s when the co-founder of Daptone Records "discovered" him in a Brooklyn nightclub performing as a James Brown act called Black Velvet.  By age 62, Daptone released his first album, "No Time for Dreaming," to critical acclaim.  It made Rolling Stones' 50 Best Albums of 2011, ranking him alongside smash hit artists like Adele and Frank Ocean.

But success only seems to make him more humble.  Bradley's painful past, which includes the shooting death of his brother in 2000, can be heard in his songs, notably 2011's "Heartaches and Pain."

"My songs come from a lot of my deep emotion, from the trials and tribulations that I've been through," he said.  "Every lyric got a picture behind it.  That's why sometimes it gets very emotional for me."

Now 64, he recently released his second album, "Victim of Love," and has embarked on his first world tour.  Now the world will get to hear the Screaming Eagle of Soul.  They'll get to see his moves -- he's been dancing since he was 4 years old.  They'll get to witness his spirit; his performance is coated in his faith -- at one point in the show he screams, "Can I go to church!" And they'll get their hugs.  Bradley so much as promises it.

"My goal now's really getting out into the music industry, getting to people's eyes so they're really seeing me," he said.  "I see a lot of hurt in people's faces, and I see a lot of joy.  That's why I like going out to the public, hugging them, letting them know that I see it."

Heartaches and Pain

ART BEAT - Using Digital Technologies

"How Are Arts Organizations Using Digital Technologies?" by Jeffrey Brown and Tom LeGro, PBS Newshour 1/4/2013

Excerpt

Have you ever live-tweeted during a classical music performance? Used a museum's mobile app? "Liked" a cultural event on Facebook? Done a yarn bombing?

A new study, "Arts Organizations and Digital Technologies," published Friday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, looks at the ways in which cultural organizations -- theater companies, orchestras, museums -- are using the Internet, social media and mobile apps to grow, promote and enrich the things they do.

The survey, taken by 1,244 arts organizations that have received funding by the National Endowment for the Arts, examined everything from budget demands and staffing to live-tweeting events and cell phone interruptions.

Earlier Friday, Jeffrey Brown talked to Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project, about the findings.

You can read the study here: Arts Organizations and Digital Technologies.