Interdisciplinary artist Samora Pinderhughes’ healing project has won a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.
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Interdisciplinary artist Samora Pinderhughes’ healing project has won a $1 million grant from the Mellon Foundation.
Ray Neutron/Artist provided
There’s a remarkable multidisciplinary artist who, despite only being 31 years old, just won a rare $1 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to fund his work. Masu. Samora Pinderhughes.
Pinder Hughes does a lot of things. He is also a vocalist, pianist, composer, and filmmaker. He is also an activist against mass incarceration. For the past eight years, he has been working on something called “The Healing Project.” As the name suggests, it is about healing, being emotionally open to one’s own feelings, the experiences of others, and generosity. That tolerance for vulnerability is evident in Pinderhughes’ sweet, warm voice and the broad perspective of his work.
He was inspired by the plays of one of his mentors, playwright and actress Anna Deaver Smith. Anna Deaver Smith often bases her work on documentary interviews she herself conducts. She asked him if he was interested in exploring something similar. It led Pinderhughes, originally from the Bay Area and now based in New York City, on a journey to dialogue with people across the country about incarceration and structural violence.
Pinder Hughes has always been involved in activism. His parents are professors and community activists. “For me, it was very natural to start creating things that had a message,” he says.
He then attended Juilliard as a jazz student. “I came there to play the piano,” he says. “I don’t think this was the right place for me by any means. But at the time I didn’t know that songwriting was a career. I didn’t think, ‘Oh, okay, I can be myself too.’ I am an artist and create my own work. There I met some wonderful teachers, especially Frank Kimbrough, Kendall Briggs, and Kenny Barron, who encouraged me to be who I am. ” At the same time, he says, he felt surrounded by fellow students who were more interested in becoming the strongest technical player possible.
“During that time, I was very interested in what was going on in the world and how to communicate something about it through music, and how to collaborate with different disciplines. Actors “I wanted to create something with them,” he added. “It was with the string players. I was a little lost in the source there.”
jazz night in america
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One particular turning point led Pinderhughes to use his music to directly address racial violence. “I think what actually happened was the Ferguson uprising and the murder of Mike Brown. It was really just an indictment of something,” he observes. Ultimately, that led to Pinder Hughes’ ambitious creation of his 2016 work. conversion suitea work that fuses jazz, spoken word poetry, and visuals with a plea for social justice.
In its current form, The Healing Project is comprised of many elements, including music, film, and visual art. It is meant to be performed and experienced in different ways and in different places. Pinderhughes, who is of mixed race and black ancestry, says there is one central question at the heart of it all.
Samora Pinderhughes
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“It ended up being a question of recovery from structural violence,” he says. “Structural violence basically refers to any kind of trauma that comes from violence that society has created. So it could be incarceration, it could be police brutality, it could be just poverty or circumstances. “It’s about my upbringing and my environment. I took them on a journey to talk about what they’ve been through and how they’ve overcome it.”
Hundreds of these conversations included people who are currently incarcerated. Many of them contributed their own art to the project. Pinderhughes worked with a group of professional artists and musicians to meditate on those conversations, including the album. sorrow. Other parts of the project include live performances of his and a visual exhibition of his art that was exhibited at his Buena Center for the Arts in Yerba in San Francisco last year.
“We didn’t really want to limit it,” Pinderhughes says. “So, basically, I’ve done everything that each person has asked me to do. If you want me to send you works that you would have done if you were incarcerated, those will be included in the exhibition. “If they want to talk about loss and grief, we’ll make a film about that. If they want to talk about the process of recovery from long-term incarceration, we’ll make a film about it. I plan to create a piece of work.”
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The spread of healing projects is also a creative vessel, a catalyst for action, and a new collaborative model, so dynamic that it caught the attention of the Mellon Foundation. Emil Kang oversees the arts and culture program. He was struck by Pinder Hughes’ vision.
“I started asking him about his own artistic practice, and he started to bifurcate his work in a way: over there about his music, here about his lived experience, and We talked about the abolition effort over there, and we talked about how much he looked forward to that day, when he could actually put all this together.”
“Frankly, I was saddened to hear what he said to me, but I still understood exactly what he was saying. The ecosystem that we have now, Especially the performing arts sector, which still exists in the trade,” Kang continued. At the Mellon Foundation, we truly believe that as we seek to advance what the future of our own work and the performing arts looks like, it is: Under the guise of contemporary performance, it allows artists to show not only the virtuosity of their skills, but also the totality of their humanity in their work. ”
It is extremely rare for a single performer to win $1 million in grants. This is about the same amount as the Nobel Prize. The funding will enable The Healing Project to do even more, Pinderhughes said. He also asserted that this was truly a collaborative effort, saying, “Everyone who was on the project had a stake in it, so everyone who had previously worked on this project You co-own it with me. Being part of the project means you have as much say in its content as I do.”
“I am truly honored and humbled to have the opportunity to take this project into the stratosphere,” continues Pinderhughes. “This is really just the beginning of what we’ve been planning. I’m an artist and I believe deeply in the power of art, but at the same time, I’m also a big believer in the power of art in the lives of people who are a part of it. I want to make a material difference. In the communities I want to serve.”
For example, Pinderhughes plans to publish a book version of The Healing Project because so many participants are incarcerated. Otherwise, collaboration is not accessible.
When he asked participants what they needed to create a place for spiritual or material healing, some interviewees said they wanted something as basic as healthy food or access to a job. I answered that I needed something. For formerly incarcerated people, they can be very difficult to secure.
Samora Pinderhughes
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“We are also launching an initiative called The Healing Project Transformative Impact Fund,” Pinderhughes said. Those who participated in the project were particularly formerly and currently incarcerated people. ”
At the same time, he says, “We’re going to keep doing that art, that narrative work, we’re going to make books, we’re going to make more albums, we’re going to do more and more exhibitions. We’re going to make more movies.” ”
In the meantime, he hopes the power of The Healing Project’s music and its art will help both creators and viewers chart their own paths to healing. He recalls a man approaching him after a recent performance.
“He felt we should make a shirt that said, ‘I make grown men cry,'” says Pinderhughes. “And I thought, ‘That’s not a bad idea.’ So, just kidding, this is the tagline for what energy is.”
On Friday night, Pinder Hughes and his musical collaborators will perform a concert version of “The Healing Project” at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. Almost inevitably, people will cry. And that’s a big part of healing.
Edited by: Neda Ulabi
Produced by: Anastasia Tsiolkas
Audio story creator: Isabella Gomez Sarmiento
Audio Story Editor: Neda Ulaby
