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It’s a Tuesday night in January in New York City, the final night of NYC Winter JazzFest and maybe 200 or so people are packed into The Kitchen to see Samora Pinderhughes multimedia exhibit, GRIEF And Process.
For the next two hours Pinderhughes and his crew, which includes musicians, artists and dancers, will transfix the audience with a show that can only be called true art. Sage Bava and I sit next to each other, her crying, me uplifted, but both equally moved and awed into speechlessness by the beauty, sadness and ultimately healing of the transcendent performance.
That is what art does. It transforms, it elevates, it moves, it makes you think and feel, and, in the case of Hughes, heal. At the end Hughes and his ensemble do a new song, which simply repeats, “Forgive yourself, learn to live with yourself.” It is mesmerizing.
Given the power, depth and scope of what Hughes is seeking with his work it is no surprise that this morning, before he plays Carnegie Hall in New York tonight, he was announced as the recipient of a one million dollar grant from The Mellon Foundation for his Healing Project.
According to a press release, the grant will be “Distributed over 38 months, the funding will go towards the expansion of art works in The Healing Project exhibition, the creation of a book version of The Healing Project, the continuation of THP’s exhibitions and free community programs, and the creation of additional albums & films. The grant also provides the initial funding for The Healing Project Transformative Impact Fund, which provides seed money and mentorship for selected interviewees who are currently or formerly incarcerated to work on their own special projects over the course of the grant, aiming to make their own dreams & goals come true.”
The day before The Kitchen performance Bava and I met up with Pinderhughes at a Harlem cafe to discuss his work, the profound impact of grief and much more. This is a truly special conversation with someone Bava accurately describes as a “magical being.”
Steve Baltin: We were talking about it this morning and it’s so interesting because you interviewed a hundred people, right? As you interviewed a hundred people, were there common threads you found in grief because grief to me is a very personal experience?
Samora Pinderhughes: Yeah, it was really a lot of different things and it kind of spread the map. But I would say a lot of the common threads I found had less to do with the experience and more to do with the practices, if that makes sense. The rituals that people needed to do and move through to go into the grieving process. And some of that was very personal. And then some of it was the more communal things, but I’m trying to think of some specific examples off the top of my head. I think one through line that came up a lot was basically the way I would describe it is like, everything I need is not what I’m supposed to need or not how I’m supposed to feel at this moment. It’s like the way that I’ve been taught, I’m supposed to respond to this thing is the exact opposite of how I actually feel like responding. And also the other common thing was when something, when this thing happened to me, nobody around me knew how best to support me, to respond to it.
Baltin: So what was your first experience with grief?
Pinderhughes: My first experience, it’s interesting. I have a very personal answer to that and a spiritual answer. But my personal experience with first one was losing my grandfather. And that’s definitely informed a lot ’cause we were really close and like lived together. He basically was like my best friend. That was my first personal loss that really informed a lot for me. And I went through years of dealing and processing that. But then also musically, a lot of the songs that I write I literally feel like I’m talking to dead people I never met. So there’s a song that I wrote after Sandra Bland was murdered by the police and I talked to her mom to write this piece. And the song “Grief,” on the album, which was originally inspired by a person not only that had lost somebody, but that was basically feeling vengeful in that context and thinking through that process. That’s not a thing that I’ve ever experienced, but in that moment, I was like, whoever this person is, this spirit is talking to me about this experience that they went through and trying to decide essentially whether to act on those impulses or not.
Baltin: When you lost your grandfather, were you surprised by your personal response?
Pinderhughes: Yes. One of the things that I remember very viscerally, which is connected to what I was talking about, is that I remember one of the responses I remember having that I didn’t expect is I got angry at a lot of my friends because I felt like they didn’t know how to be there for me. And later I realized they really legit didn’t know, like they were trying, but they weren’t taught the way to do it. We’re not taught the way to be there for people in that context. So I was pissed. I was like, “Oh, they don’t, they’re not here for me.” And then later I’m like, “No, they were trying to be there for me, but they didn’t know, and then also I didn’t know how to give them the information.”
Baltin: People don’t know how to deal with grief and that’s one of the cool things about this album.
Pinderhughes: They don’t, clueless. That’s part of what I try to do with all the work is bridge that connection between private and public. The grieving process is a very individualized process. Like you’re saying, it obviously looks different for everybody. But on the same token, I think one of the things that’s happened with modernization is that we’ve been stripped of all the traditional ways that we would normally be taught those tools to deal with. Because in every indigenous structure, they have a part of that structure that actually is built to deal with those moments. They have grieving rituals, they have ceremonies. You’re taught this is how we wrap arms around this person and give them the tools they need to get through this. But in our society now, we have no information on that. So it’s like everybody’s just kind of like adrift. And then also on top of that, it’s like there’s really a timeline. There’s a very strict timeline. Like, “Okay, you have two weeks to deal with what you need to deal with, and then we’re back to normal.” And it’s like, it never works like that.
Sage Bava: I’d love to know more of how your inner landscape has changed with the Healing Project. I read an interview that said that it’s really changed the way that you think and how you do your own rituals.
Pinderhughes: Yeah, it’s, one of the things that’s the most important to me about this project. And we can definitely talk even more about the details in terms of how the project is expanding now. But it’s a very communal project. And the luck of that for me is that it’s become this family where all around the country, I’m able to pour into others and they’re pouring back into me through this exchange. And so there are a lot of really practical things that I really learned from this process. And one of the goals that I have for the project is that eventually we’ll be able to have different formats in musical, in the policy world, in written form and all these different contexts where we can actually give people this roadmap for like, here’s all these things that we collectively learn through this project that actually could be of very practical use to people. And so I think, just to give examples on that, I guess I would say like to figure out the ways in which you are able to identify the qualities in yourself that mean the most to you personally, that would normally be robbed by a certain environment. And we each have different versions of that environment. Now I learned that in a much more difficult environment than the one I participate in, which is that one of the interviews and somebody who’s close to me, his name’s Keith Lamar, he’s on death row in Ohio. His execution date is in November of this year. So one of the big things that we’re working on in the project is bringing light to his case, trying to put pressure so that we can get him off of death row. But one of the conversations I had with him, which we made a piece around, is he talks about how one of the most important qualities to him is his sweetness. And how in the context of him trying to survive in that environment, that’s one of the things that is robbed from him. Or they try to get rid of the quickest. And even prior to that experience, just his living environment, he’s like, this is something I had to fight to hold onto. And so that’s something I think about all the time where I’m like, if I’m not very conscious of the things that are really most important to me in the ways that I want to operate, there’s a good chance that those will get taken away just totally without like me even noticing it by the environments that I’m in. That’s a great example. Like my sweetness as a man living in the world is very difficult sometimes to hold onto your sweetness or as an artist trying to assert yourself and do whatever you need to do. There’s ways in which the world will try to say, this is not something that is necessary for you to like move forward or something like that. But it’s very important for me. So that’s something that I really learned in the project. That’s like one example of that.
Bava: Yeah. I feel this so much with Dani [Murcia, singer] and a lot of the other vocalists and collaborators that you have. They have this strong sense and hold on to that sweetness and soul. Was that always something that you knew that you needed to cultivate and hold or you’ve gone through the ringer and lost it and found it again? And the relationship to spirituality and channeling that soul, is that something that you really had to discover or is something that is always just you’ve held onto? I’m a writer and musician and I’ve had to lose it and find it and lose it and find it. And it’s interesting to hear other people’s experience.
Pinderhughes: I definitely feel like the thing that helps me out the most with that, and it’s perfect that you talk about Dani, is surrounding myself with that community. And obviously that’s like a partly a luck thing ’cause there are things you can control about that, choices you can make and things about people that come into your life. But I think that for me, when I think about that question, I think about people, I think about space and I think like, “I’ll get to the space part but with the community part, I think building a set of relationships where we can be vulnerable with one another, that’s the key to that to me.” And sometimes that can be difficult because it means that you have to, number one, trust those people a lot and, number two, like you have to, you kind of have to navigate your own walls and how to bring them down in that process. But I find that once you do that with the right people, if you’re lucky enough to have people that you can kind of take your heart, hand them, hand it over to them, then it’s like you are held in this very deep way. And then to then also have the privilege to make art with those people from that space. That’s when it gets really deep to me because it becomes everybody’s material, like we are all giving all of ourselves to the work. Also, to me, that’s what the whole point of doing art. That’s what I’m in it for, is like literally to just risk everything of myself in it and just build that vulnerable space so that people can enter it. And then that’s again that’s where the physical space part comes into me too, because I think oftentimes as artists, particularly musicians, I think especially the spaces that we’re into, sometimes they can be very functional and very cold. Like you’re entering a venue and it’s like you’re not getting anything from that environment. So I feel like that’s something unexpected that I was given when I decided to take the root of becoming a visual artist, starting to make exhibitions, starting to work in theater and film. Is you just have an opportunity you never have your music, which is to literally craft space and to really have an opportunity to marry the sound with the environment and then to fill it with the people. And hopefully you’ll feel that. And that’s kind of like an intervention that I’m hoping to expand and continue, is to basically do that all over the world is to really build spaces of collective healing where people can enter them. My dream is literally have a space, put all the things in it, and then we do shows and we do talks and we do things, but also we do youth programs in there. We do organizing meetings in there. People can come and work on whatever they want to work on in there because it transforms your whole being to just do whatever you are doing in that kind of space, rather than doing it in any other type of environment.
Baltin: What were those first couple of moments for you where you recognized that vulnerability and it told you that it’s okay to have feelings and be open about them?
Pinderhughes: There are so many, but the ones that come to mind immediately, one is Laura Mvula, her first record Sing to the Moon. That album messed me up. Definitely Marvin [Gaye]. Another one that’s been really important to me, another one that’s been extremely important to me in a very interesting way, ’cause it’s not one that you would expect, but Paul Robeson. Something about the way he sings. And then also I’ve basically read everything about him ever because I find him to be a very important person that’s completely overlooked in the modern age. But he really inspired me particularly just in terms of being somebody that in the public eye, he was projected as the definition of the masculine, the definition of the larger than life figure. And he basically risked everything, I mean both politically and personally to be himself and speak to his truth. So that inspired me a lot. Definitely I would definitely say [Bob] Dylan for sure. I’m very attracted to music that takes risks, but in the emotional way.
Baltin: What do you hope to come from the Mellon Foundation grant?
Pinderhughes: So basically the Mellon grant is giving us a chance to do the first of what I believe will be many expansions of this project. And the most important thing for me to communicate about it is that it’s not just an expansion of the art, but to me it’s like a mission statement about what I believe should be a sea change in the way that things are done. And one example of that is, of all the things we’ve been able to make with the project, which so far has been exhibition and album and a digital archive, none of that can get in the prisons because all the prison companies block everything. So we’re making a book version so that we can get it into the prisons be it now. And we’re doing all different types of versions of things like that, doing another album with the interviews so that we can flip that. And then the other thing is that it’s about building a structure that will not only talk about the things that we want to talk about and deconstruct the narratives around criminality that I believe are most harmful to our society but also to change lives in that process. So there’s few things we’re doing with that. One is we’re creating a structure where all of the work in the project will be collectively owned by everybody that participates in it, including all the people in the prisons. So for instance, all the people that gave interviews, all the people that will be on the album, all the people that will be a part of the book, they will be paid and have publishing. Because my observation has been that most of the time when it comes to these types of projects, it’s like, okay, we went and we talked with a bunch of people and we tell their story and now we’re done. And the person that made it is the only person that really lives are changed through the project, to be quite honest. The one question I asked everybody is, if you could build a space for your own healing and you could construct what it looks like and what’s in it and where it is, and there’s no boundaries of like physical reality, what would it look like and what would it have in it? And I collected those responses and the institute will be the manifestation of those answers.
Bava: Was there a main theme that popped up in what people shared in that?
Pinderhughes: Yes, a big one was nature particularly because for many of the folks that I’m talking about, so many of them had never left their area and never had the opportunity to experience a lot of things outside of that framework. A lot of it was having the time and the context to be able to be creative. So like people would say a room with studios, a space with studios in it, or a space where I can sit and write and I can write letters or I can write poetry or whatever. Another big one was no walls, open space. That was a huge, huge thing. Walls. Oh, and food [laughter], everyone was like we have to be able to eat, have to be able to be together. Oh, and another one that I found was beautiful was that there should be a revolving door.
Bava: As far as the poetry and the nature is concerned as people like finding their own voice within their writing, have you held workshops to facilitate helping people discover that within themselves? Have you like created those kind of workshops yet? Or that’s in the future?
Pinderhughes: That’s exactly one of the things we’re hoping to do more and expand. And basically we’re trying to connect it to space. So we’ve done it one time, which was around the first exhibition we did, which was Center for the Arts in San Francisco last year. And so when we did the exhibition there, we had it there for six months. Every single thing we did was free and open to the public. And we did community programming through all six months. So that was one of the things we did was we did. Some, we facilitated and then also we just like also brought in organizations that were already doing that to work with them so that we didn’t have to create new structures. But, we facilitated poetry workshops, did a couple songwriting things, both with actually elders and youth, which was fascinating to be with like the older folks. And then we tried to tie that with political education in workshops as well. So we would be able to do the craft of just expressing and then also saying like, “Here’s how I approach marrying that personal expression with the information.” But that is something I hope to do a lot more of. And I hope to also just like build a little bit of a Dream Team that can do that. Because my dream is that we have somebody in every artistic discipline that when we can build those classes, it can be like, alright, I’m working on teaching the musical element part of it or working with words in a certain way. And then a poet is working on that element, a director or a theatrical person working on that. We got all these different people in these different elements. And I’m lucky enough that like my mentors are Anna Deavere Smith in theater, Titus Kaphar in visual art and Glenn Ligon. And then obviously in music, like so many different people. So my hope is that that’s kind of a space that we can build because I think that’s one of the other things I see as missing is that there are a lot of places where you can learn how to do one thing, but basically nowhere especially for young people, teaches you how to conceive of being a multidisciplinary artist. It’s a very much still the conservatory approach of like, “Oh, you’re a pianist, we’ll teach you how to play piano better.” But nobody teaches you how to collaborate.
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