Bree Edwards: Welcome, and thank you for joining me for Works in Progress, a podcast about artistic research, experimentation, and collaboration. My name is Bree Edwards, and I’m the director of the ArtLab, a multidisciplinary incubator for the arts at Harvard. The ArtLab supports creative research and development and is a special initiative of Harvard’s office of the President and Provost. While we commission new work and support course-based workshops, the Artist Residency program is the foundation of the art lab. In this podcast, we speak with the artists and residents at ArtLab, and those that are working at Harvard about how they are grappling with contemporary issues and transforming ideas into art. 

Vijay Iyer: Hi. Sorry, I am not Samora Pinderhughes. I am Vijay Iyer. I’m a professor, the Franklin D. and Florence Rosenblatt Professor of the Arts here in the Department of Music and in the Department of African and African American Studies here at Harvard. I’m going to give a few remarks about our artist of the day. They’re not too long, but they’re longer than usual, partly because he’s my student, but also actually more importantly because it’s not every day that you get to gas someone up in front of their dad and their grandmother. And so let it be known that the Pinderhughes of Boston are in the house. That’s right.  

Samora Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, vocalist, and interdisciplinary artist and surrealist whose work delves into all the things our society tries to hide – its history, its structures, and the individual and daily things we all experience but don’t know how to talk about. His art is an invitation to feel things deeply and to think deeply about how we all live. He is known for his honest lyrics, his nuanced harmonic language, his sociopolitical commentary, and his commitment to making art that is of use to everyday life.  

As a scholar, Shawna Redmond notes “Protest musics are musics that you know by their use. It’s not something you’ll necessarily read in the lyrics or identify in the composition, but it is something you recognize by how communities use this music. Their defining traits”, she continues, “are not just popularity, but a robust sensibility. People feel deeply attached to these songs”.  

I’ve been in awe of Samora’s creative trajectory in the 10 years that I’ve known him, and especially during his five years in our doctoral program in Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry here at Harvard. A musician and thinker blessed with intellect, compassion and humility, Samora is becoming slowly but inevitably a generation-defining artist, a sought-after public intellectual, and a provocative cultural instigator.  

As an artist and scholar, Samora brings a combination of wisdom, authenticity, and optimism that is rare and genuine. Never flashy or pretentious, Samora’s work has great depth and a strong ethical compass. His projects often emerge from a research sensibility, sometimes building from existing archives and, more often, from deep, caring personal relationships that evolve into substantive collaborations. Though ambitious, his projects never feel like homework. They speak from the heart and they communicate with elemental power. As a side note, the most ringing endorsement of his music was when I heard my teenage daughter singing his songs to herself.  

He yokes his art to a carefully studied and historically grounded agenda of social justice, community service, and black liberation. Samora’s dedication to community plays out in the fabric of his work, with its multiplicity of voices and its near ritualistic, embodied practice. In the prospectus for his dissertation and progress, which I’m allowed to quote from, Samora wrote, and I quote, “The chorus as a musical practice has much to teach us about collective action. By the chorus, I mean a multiplicity of voices”, he continues, “moving in sync or in communication, but all still with their own characteristics, identities and experiences”.  

As the great historian Robin DG Kelly told Samora recently, “What is the commitment of the artist to social movements? In many ways, you really embody that. Making a choice to create art that isn’t simply making a statement, but where you engage people where they are and struggle to try to figure out together in the chorus, to find a way forward to transform the world that we’re in”.  

Samora is joined today by a remarkable chorus of his collaborators, whose own creativity and mutual attunement will dazzle you: Dani Murcia, Nia Drummond, Nio Levon, Elliot Skinner, Jehbreal Jackson, and Joshua Crumbly. I’ve gotten to spend time with all of them over the past years, and as you will see, they’ve formed a special artistic family of their own. When I walked into this room today, I felt showered by their love. Such is the spirit of unity and care that they have cultivated together. And with that, I’m just going to hand it off to Samora Pinderhughes and the Healing Project. Thank you. 

Chorus (singing):  With the bowed down head and the aching heart, give me little time to pray. With the bowed down head and the aching heart, oh, give me a little time to pray. With the bowed down head and the aching heart, oh, give me a little time to pray. With a bowed down head and an aching heart, give me a little time to pray. With a bowed down head and an aching heart, oh, give me a little time to pray. To pray. I see the signs. Yeah. I see the signs. Yeah. 

Bree: Samora, it’s really wonderful to have you in the studio today. Thanks for being here. 

Samora: Thank you for having me. 

Bree: We are here today because you performed with the Healing Project last night and we can include little segments of that. But for those who weren’t with us last night, it was an incredibly powerful concert. Can you describe what people experienced or what they heard last night when they came to the performance of the Healing Project? 

Samora: Thank you. Thanks for having me. I’ll do my best. I never know what people feel or, you know, it’s a very intense project, and so I’m always feeling, in a sense, almost separate from the audience during the show because it’s so heavy. But then, you know, being able to see people’s reactions afterward, you can kind of tell that they were with you, but I think that for me, the Healing Project performance work is a lot about community.  

It’s the community that we’re having with the incarcerated members of our performance chorus, who are there with us through the interviews that we play. And then there are the people on stage who are like my musical family – many different vocalists with a focus on the powers of the human voice. 

Bree: And it was incredible, those human voices. Can you tell us what the Healing Project is? 

Samora: Yes, the Healing Project is an arts organization that co-creates and co-presents large-scale artworks like albums, books, exhibitions, and performances throughout the United States, and all of that work is both made with and about people who have experienced trauma from structural violence. There’s a particular focus on the experiences and realities of the prison industrial complex, but we also go beyond that to work with youth who have dealt with large amounts of violence, as well as people who have dealt with the court system, the immigration system, and policing. We use the artistic work that we do to try to make material impacts both on individual lives, using things like freedom campaigns to get people out of the prison, as well as to try to influence policy around hopefully the eventual abolition of the prison industrial complex. 

Bree: And we at the ArtLab are really coming into being introduced to the Healing Project to support work around your dissertation. But this is not new work. How long have you been engaged with the Healing Project and doing this type of work? 

Samora: I started the project in 2014, and we’ve been an organization since 2023. So this iteration, and this kind of expansion of the work, is very new. But yeah, it’s been my life’s work basically. 

Bree: So, I’d like to just take a step back and talk about how you came to the work of the Healing Project, your personal path there. Last night we had many members of your family with us in the audience, and that was beautiful. You and I have talked a little bit about how you found your way to this work through the work that your family members have done. So, I just wanted to talk a little bit about how you found your way to this mission-driven work and a little bit about your family. How did the Healing Project work begin for you? 

Samora: Yes, it’s definitely been a lifetime project, as I know you and I have talked about. It’s very informed by my family, both my family history and also my parents. Both of my parents are community organizers, educators, and activists. Growing up with them, I was always inspired to use my gifts as an artist to try to, you know, really make my community a more beautiful and beneficial place, which is the spirit of Kuumba, which is one of the Kwanzaa principles, which is something I celebrated growing up. So I always think about that as kind of my guiding principle.   

My whole family is very deeply into this kind of work. Just as an example, my grandma, who came to the performance yesterday, she was one of the first black genealogists in the history of black genealogy, pretty much before anybody else was doing that work. She was, going to the South, getting the documents of our family history, and engaging in the question of “what does this mean in terms of the transatlantic slave trade” and all of that.  

So I’m very deeply just trying to live inside the lineage of – her name is Elaine Pinderhughes, by the way. She taught for many years in the city of Boston. And so yeah, just very inspired by that lineage. And then also by being a part of the community growing up in the Bay Area and wanting to make a difference with music. 

Bree: So why did you choose to bring this work to Harvard? 

Samora: I didn’t necessarily originally choose specifically to bring it to Harvard. I came to Harvard to be part of the Creative Practice and Critical Inquiry program with Professor Vijay Iyer. Because Vijay’s work really influenced me, generally as a pianist, but also his project called the Veterans Dreams Project, which was one of the core influences behind the Healing Project. When I started working on the Healing Project and found out about this program, it felt like a place where I could engage in the research practice and process that I needed to really ground the work that I was doing while also still being able to be respected and understood as an artist that is practicing. 

I think that’s what’s really special about the CPCI program. All the artists that are part of it are deep inside of scholarship, but they’re also practicing artists. And it was just like a home for me, in that way. And so through that I’ve found myself at Harvard, and hopefully trying to use this time here to develop, particularly, this work around the Healing Project. 

Bree: Last night you mentioned this too, that it’s a department that’s allowed you to be yourself, that has lifted you up and held you, but also that it has been flexible and allowed you to move with your practice, in your career, as you’ve needed to. I ask in part because one of the things that the ArtLab tries to do is follow the artists, so the project takes us to places we never thought we’d go or directions, or doing work, that we hadn’t quite expected. And I can imagine that in the Healing Project, you find that too.  

So, I wanted to ask: As you pick the stories that you want to tell, how are you selecting them and how are you matching those stories with storytellers? How do you follow that story? 

Samora: It’s a good question. I have no good answer because there’s no rhyme or reason to it, to be honest, except just, I guess, the artistic and creative process, which is very unknowable. Even though the healing project has become an organization, its mission extends past the artwork that we make, and as a practice, even when it extends into that organization, I still approach everything as a creative project and as a creative artist.  

What I mean by that is the way that I make decisions is based on what moves me the most and also what moves the community of artists that are a part of the project the most. That includes our interviewees who are incarcerated all around the country. So a lot of it is just developed through conversations, just asking people, “What is most important to you right now that we do?” and then we just do that. Or “What doesn’t exist?” or “What problems need to be solved?” and then we just do that.  

So, as you said, it’s very nonlinear. There’s not really – I can’t say that what I thought this was about 10 years ago is what it’s about now. It’s a whole different thing than I originally planned, but that is because, I think, I’m trying to follow the threads of what comes up. 

Bree: One of my favorite sayings I saw on the wall of the Queens Museum once while they were designing for the park next door to the museum. What I’ve always loved about the Queen Museum is that they always have a community organizer on staff because doing this kind of organizing work is important. Often museums institutions are called upon to do it, but there are not people actually trained in doing that type of work on the staff.  

The quote was, “it’s not a lack of resources, it’s a lack of coordination”. And I’ve heard you mention that what you’re doing is doing a land scan of who’s already doing the work. How do we bring those people together and connect them instead of recreating it? So, I guess I want to ask the question: Do you see this as a model that could scaffold, or is this more about convening people who are already doing the work together to have more impact? Or, maybe, it’s a little bit of both?  

Samora: My hope is that it’s that scaffolding work. I do think that as a national, and hopefully global and artistic project, at the moment we are very mobile in the sense that we’re not based in mostly one city. Our main city is New York, but I think that part of what our purpose is right now is to move around and work with a lot of different folks. I’m not under the illusion that we can do the same things as people who have permanent presence in certain places, but I do think that, you know, the idea is for it to have a lasting impact. And I don’t think it’s only about bringing people together, but it’s also about what we have to offer.  

It’s about that meeting point of what the art offers and then how that can be of use to what folks are doing. So, yeah, I do want it to go past convening and I want it to have, hopefully, the kind of impact where it reverberates for a long time. But at the same time, like I said, I’m also very conscious that we are only present in certain places for a limited period of time, and so we have to always be in conversation and pay respects to folks that are there to stay. 

Bree: And you and your collaborators are incredibly moving, powerful catalysts. When you come in, it’s beautiful.  

We’re just at the start of this conversation, so I hope you will come back and talk with us. We’re catching you as you’re on tour; you had a show here at Harvard last night, and you’re on the road to the next city. So, thank you so much for joining us today. 

Samora: Of course, definitely only the beginning. And I’m honored and grateful to be in collaboration with Artlab. Like you said, it’s only the beginning of a lot of different things that we will be engaged with together. I’m very excited and inspired by the work of all the different artists creating here, and I’m happy to be a part of the community. 

Bree: Thank you. And it’s wonderful to connect because you already have such a relationship with Harvard after being here for so many years. 

Samora: Yeah, it’s an interesting one because I was in school during the pandemic. So, my relationship with the institution has been very in and out, mostly on purpose but also because of things like the pandemic. But I’m really grateful that I can …[inaudible]… where I can be a part of things and bring my folks into the resources and the possibilities of spaces and institutions like this, and also take the knowledge, bring it out, steal it and put it where it needs to go. 

Bree: We have so much to learn from you. From building artist-led organizations, which is different, to your teaching a class in the spring, and then as a practicing artist, there’s so much that we have to learn from you. So, thank you. 

Samora: Thanks a lot. 

Bree: Thank you for listening to Works in Progress, a production of the ArtLab at Harvard University. It is located on the traditional territory of the Massachusetts people and the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. This podcast is recorded and produced in the Mead Production Lab and features artists who are working here.  

For more information about the show, the ArtLab, and the artists featured, please visit artlab.harvard.edu. You can also follow us on Instagram or Facebook by searching ArtLab at Harvard. Thank you. 

Samora (singing): Stop lights could be murder, movements could be murder, conversations be murder. Promise me I’ll be alive when I leave my home. Promise me I’ll be alive when I try. Stop lines could be murder, checkpoints could be murder. Steel bars and they put a charge on my name. Now I think they got me back in chains. If I die before you wake, I need you to know that I was looking forward to my new job tomorrow.