INSIDE An interview with Samora Pinderhughes, a community power resource guide, song lyrics, and more.
Dear community, First things first: welcome. Deep breath, open-armed welcome. We are honored that you have chosen to spend your time with us and experience Samora Pinderhughes’s The Healing Project. YBCA has been a presence in Samora’s artistic life for decades: when he was a young student, and then a member of our 2017 YBCA 100, and now in this latest collaboration. We are grateful to the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation for making The Healing Project at YBCA possible. DEBORAH CULLINAN FORMER CEO
At YBCA, we uplift transformational relationships with artists working at the intersection of creative practice and community well-being. We know that artists are essential to social change, and we invest in creatives seeking to shift systems, with community voices in the lead and collaborative artistic vision at the helm. That’s all right here in The Healing Project. Inside the exhibition, we’ll be welcoming healing circles, movement meetings, performances, pop-ups, dialogues, and creative experiences, all free to the public. It’s a living, breathing space where folks can reflect, act, and participate. While the project tenderly holds the realities of trauma and grief, its compass points toward the resilience and healing practices of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated peoples. It is built for a singular purpose: to nurture social change and radical possibility.
MEKLIT HADERO CHIEF OF PROGRAM
Along with The Healing Project’s physical presentation, we are working with Samora and his collaborators to advance advocacy and policy solutions, driven by communities that are themselves most impacted by the carceral system. The Healing Project’s digital archive offers a space to delve into the stories that inspired the project with original scores by Samora. The digital archive centers the voices and narratives of the interviewees themselves. This project is an all-hands-on-deck effort, which means that our whole organization has participated in bringing this work to you. The Healing Project calls on us to examine our own institutional practices and policies. In other words, what institutional change did we need to enact in order to authentically bring this work to the public? In a deeply reflective way, we asked ourselves: Does carceral logic, as defined by scholar Mariame Kaba as “a punishment mindset,” manifest at YBCA? 1 To truly confront these questions, we entered into a long-term dialogue with Samora and examined our approach to security. With Samora in the lead, we’re removing barriers between audience and artwork (don’t be afraid to get close!), developing new trainings to redefine what security means for us, and committing to putting new learnings into long-term practice. The Healing Project sings a resonance of wholeness. It is composed in the key of resilience, expressed and defined by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people. May this experience allow for our collective catharsis, a clear-eyed vision of justice, and a heart-centered, humanfocused understanding of systemic harm. Be well, and stay in touch. We hope to see you again. Onward and forward,
Deborah Cullinan Former CEO
Meklit Hadero Chief of Program
NOTE 1. Mariame Kaba and Erica R. Meiner, “Arresting the Carceral State,” Jacobin, February 24, 2014, https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/02/arresting-the-carceral-state/.
2
CURATORIAL NOTE
The Healing Project is an expansive constellation of artistic reckoning that deconstructs systems of violence by platforming compassion, empathy, and dialogue. Since its founding, the United States has ignored the trauma inflicted on individuals and communities through the police state, the prison industrial complex, and white supremacy. Within The Healing Project, artworks reveal how capitalism and oppression weave through the fabric of our everyday lives. This persistent absorption of inhumane cruelty is not the only way to exist in our world. Samora Pinderhughes created The Healing Project to move us toward a society built on love and care over violence and punishment. Here, the complexity in which these systems are embedded in our lives is unraveled through multiple mediums, opening numerous portals to deeper understanding and healing. The Healing Project takes many forms—it is an exhibition at YBCA, a digital archive of interviews, a music album, and a series of community gatherings and performances. Each component takes inspiration from the others. In the exhibition, Process (2022) and Masculinity (2022)—films by Pinderhughes and collaborators Christian Padron, Kassim Norris, and Ray Neutron—speak to societal gatekeeping around understandings of grief and patriarchy, topics that arose while Pinderhughes developed the digital archive. Pinderhughes looks inward to how we can collectively repair one another from the brutality of our nation. The Healing Project holds the processing of grief as central to that repair. Nnaemeka Ekwelum’s grief cloths allow the artist to process grief and memory through the crafting of each piece, finding beauty, growth, and resiliency along the way. The cloths are a two-part ritual for the artist—first the act of weaving the artwork, and then the site-specific sculpting of the object onto its presentation surface. Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts’s print series Redaction (2019–present) is presented in part, along with illustrations by Pitt Panther. These works utilize portraiture to forefront the humanity that is so often erased by the carceral system. Currently incarcerated, Panther uses his artistic practice to fight for freedom and peace for all. Kaphar and Betts’s works combine portraiture of incarcerated individuals with poetry by Betts that includes source material from lawsuits of individuals who could not pay their court fines and fees. Brought together through The Healing Project, these artworks platform harmful truths and the faces that suffer for it. As you move through the exhibition, you’ll encounter voices of people who have or are experiencing direct harm from the carceral system alongside music of liberation and artworks that share an understanding of how we can begin to heal one another. The Healing Project has ushered forth necessary transformation for YBCA as an organization, and now that transformation builds momentum to reverberate beyond our walls. While the exhibition is open to the public, Pinderhughes will host performances in the gallery, bringing his forthcoming album into conversation with the photography, sculpture, and illustrations by artists across the country working toward a united and just future. For Pinderhughes, healing is the lifeline to that future. Fiona Ball Manager of Curatorial Projects & Public Experience
Martin Strickland Director of Curatorial Projects & Public Experience
3
AN INTERVIEW WITH SAMORA PINDERHUGHES On December 8, 2021, YBCA Chief of Program Meklit Hadero sat down with Samora Pinderhughes to discuss the origin story of The Healing Project. This is an excerpt of their conversation; for the full interview, visit https://ybca.org/samora-meklit/
Meklit Hadero: Did The Healing Project reveal itself to you over time, or was it like a flash that arrived and you decided to pursue it? What was the process, and the inspiration? Samora Pinderhughes: It revealed itself quickly, but it also then changed over time. Once I set up the initial parameters of the project, I just had to listen and respond. Two major life influences led me to The Healing Project. One was my parents—my mom’s work in prisons and my dad’s work around youth violence prevention. I’ve always wanted to make an artistic project that approaches both of their realities. Another influence was Anna Deavere Smith. She mentored me, and I thought this could be the moment to try something interview-based related to this subject. At first, I had no idea what I was doing. No one ever wants to admit that! I did the first presentation of some of the material back around 2015. I had interviewed five or ten people, most of them my friends or people my parents 4
knew. From the start, I fell in love with the interview process because it can lead to such beautiful exchanges. I loved building relationships, making friendships. But then when I presented what I had so far, it totally didn’t work. Like, it was whack. MH: How so? SP: I tried to do it as a performance, and the material is not meant to be a performance. It was too much— something like two and a half hours long. And people responded that they couldn’t make heads or tails of it. That made me want to turn the project into an exhibition, to put different elements inside a space so people could choose how to interact with the material. They don’t have to just sit there and be overwhelmed by however I put it together. So that was a big turning point. The other reason it didn’t yet work was because I didn’t know enough yet. I had to do a lot more research. I had to interview many more people. I needed to spend real time with
almost a hundred people, building with them, being friends, and figuring out what they wanted out of the project. I needed to discover what was most important for them to share. That’s what led me along the path and why it took so long. MH: What did the people you interviewed express needing through the project? SP: They wanted the final work to be uncompromising in calling out institutions. And they wanted to be shown in full light. That was aligned with where I wanted it to be, but they were very insistent and courageous about that. At the end of the day, they’re the ones whose voices are heard. People also expressed needing trust throughout the project. A lot of trust went into this; people are sharing their very vulnerable, emotional, personal stories and ideas, which I’m deeply grateful for. They insisted that I take care of their stories. MH: I’ve seen that trust in real time. When we’ve been in meetings, for instance, one of the interviewees will call and you’ll take that call over the meeting because it’s from prison. The people who have contributed to this project, they’re not simply subjects. SP: Right. They’re a community. MH: What was your process for transforming the interviews into an artistic experience? SP: I’m a musician first and foremost, so sound was always going to come first. I intentionally did all the interviews as only sound and not video. I wanted visitors to hear the musicality of the voices. That’s a deliberate conceptual choice, made through conversations with Anna Deavere Smith. I’ve always been fascinated with voices, whether they belong to poets or musicians or writers. So the first step artistically for The Healing Project was listening to hours and hours and hours of people talking. I spent five years listening to hundreds of hours of people talking and trying to make decisions, because obviously not all of it could be in the final piece. My editorial choices involved identifying commonalities among the interviews. Finding points where it felt like people were talking
to each other, even though they had never met. I also made choices based on the sound itself. I paid attention to when a person raises the inflection of their voice or their rhythm changes. Those moments signal what they think is important. When the speaker deviates from their regular path or cadence, it’s because they are surprised, or passionate, or want to make a point, or are thrown off. Those elements really capture me. The rest came down to collaboration. I basically built a set of containers and asked the homies to fill it. So many music genres are represented. And there’s a lot of different stylistic approaches, visually. I wasn’t choosing people based on stylistic cohesiveness, to be honest. I was choosing collaborators based on their unique perspectives. MH: That relates to something you’ve said before—that the project makes space for people being whole people. If there was too much uniformity, it would flatten each person’s wholeness. There has to be a chorus. SP: Yes. A chorus. A few key words animate the entirety of the project, and one is definitely “chorus.” Another is “messiness.” The reality of life is messy: death, grief, imprisonment, trauma. That healing process, that process of moving through life, is extremely messy. “Care” is another. My hope is that The Healing Project will be a testament to honesty and care. How people care for each other and themselves, how they get through shit. Resiliency.
MH: Why did you choose to collaborate with a cultural institution in making a space for that emotional work? SP: That’s a good question. Originally I had no idea where I would present this, and I had a lot of conflicting ideas around how and where I could and should do so. Presenting this project makes me a little bit scared. It’s such an emotional and vulnerable work. It holds so many personal stories. The content requires a place that’s going to honor it in the right way. We’re not charging admission. Nobody should feel like they are under surveillance when engaging with the artworks. The exhibition should not feel exclusive to anyone. So many things have to be right for this to work. But at every turn, I’ve been encouraged by the feeling that YBCA is truly honoring all of this. Their commitment is genuine, the intentions here are genuine, and that’s what is needed for the experience to work. MH: Thank you for saying that. I appreciate the shine, love. SP: I hope that The Healing Project will provide something that is needed to each person who encounters it. It will be different for everyone, but the hope is that it provides something that’s needed. And I hope that this work adds to the ways we’re trying to shift toward a more loving, caring world. I hope people dig it.
MH: What do you want visitors to The Healing Project to take away? SP: Spiritual strengthening, for sure. Although I don’t know if that’s the right phrase. I didn’t realize at the start that this project would be about spirituality. But in a weird way, it is. I hope people come away with more tools and a deeper understanding of what so many people are dealing with. By “tools” I mean ideas for how they could approach their own issues or help others in their lives. There are a lot of tools, answers, and wisdom in this project. I hope people bring their own vulnerability to it as well. I know that’s a lot to ask for.
PHOTOS Left: Kassim Norris, Jojo Nwoko, Christian Padron and Samora Pinderhughes, Process, 2021 Above: Peter Mukuria (Pitt Panther), Revolution: Selected Works from Pitt Panther, 2021–2022 Photographs by Ray Neutron and Christian Padron
5
BAY AREA–BASED JUSTICE, HEALING, AND SUPPORT
RESOURCE GUIDE: COMMUNITY POWER, SAFETY, AND HEALING This work follows in the revolutionary leadership of abolitionist organizing and movement building across the Bay Area, California, and beyond all borders. With deep gratitude for and acknowledgment of all who do the work of healing and justice, we invite you to meet, join, and activate with these artists, advocates, and organizations.
STATEWIDE COALITIONS • Justice Teams Network: Aimed at eradicating all forms of state violence and criminal acts against prisoners. justiceteams.org • Debt Free Justice California: Advocacy coalition to end the unjust practice of charging fines and fees that further racial inequality and the criminalization of poverty. debtfreejustice.org
• Young Women’s Freedom Center: YWFC’s Sister Warriors Freedom Coalition is devoted to building the power of formerly incarcerated and system involved cis- and transgender women, girls, and gender-nonconforming people. youngwomenfree.org/sister-warriorsfreedom-coalition • Critical Resistance: A national grassroots organization building a movement to abolish the prison industrial complex. criticalresistance.org
• Anti Police-Terror Project: Blackled, multiracial, intergenerational coalition that seeks to build a replicable and sustainable model to eradicate police terror in communities of color. antipoliceterrorproject.org • Black Freighter Press: A platform for Black and brown writers to honor ancestry and propel radical imagination. blackfreighterpress.com • CWW’s Rising Voices is a professional arts program providing healing and restoration through creative expression. communityworkswest.org • Ella Baker Center: Advocating for truth and reinvestment so that Black, brown, and low-income people are free to build power and prosperity in their communities. ellabakercenter.org • FIPPP: Theater ensemble dedicated to developing and presenting the stories of those impacted by incarceration and the justice system. markkenward.com/fippp • RYSE: Richmond, California-based, consistent sanctuary of safety, compassion, and justice for all youth. rysecenter.org • Brotherhood of Elders Network: An intergenerational network of men of African ancestry who foster environments where Black boys and young men are empowered to flourish. brotherhoodofelders.net
KNOW YOUR RIGHTS CARD
FROM THE AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA FOLD HERE
6
CUT ALONG DOTTED LINE
MY RIGHTS CARD
MY RIGHTS CARD
Visit aclusocal.org for more Know Your Rights information, including what to do if stopped by the police.
I am giving you this card because I do not wish to speak to you or have any further contact with you. I choose to exercise my right to remain silent and to refuse to answer your questions. If you arrest me, I will continue to exercise my right to remain silent and refuse to answer your questions. I want to speak with a lawyer before answering your questions.
SUGGESTED READING: SEEDS AND SPARKS Dive deeper into terms found throughout The Healing Project using Samora Pinderhughes’s reading list, created in partnership with Haymarket Books, a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago, a project of the Center for Economic Research and Social Change. Haymarket titles are indicated with an asterisk.
ABOLITION
HEALING
Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, 2021*
James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, 2010
Colin Kaepernick, Abolition for the People: The Movement for a Future without Policing and Prisons, 2021
Stanford Graphic Novel Project, Flying Kites: A Story of the 2013 California Prison Hunger Strike, 2019*
Derecka Purnell, Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom, 2021 Eric A. Stanley, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, 2011 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California, 2007
CARCERAL/POLICE STATE, THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX Troy Davis, Martina Davis-Correia, and Jen Marlowe, I Am Troy Davis, 2013* George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, 1970 Keith LaMar, Condemned: The Whole Story, 2013 Marlon Precedent Peterson, Bird Uncaged: An Abolitionist’s Freedom Song, 2021 Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, 1965
GRIEF AND REMEMBRANCE Toni Morrison, Sula, 1973 Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel, 2019 Breeshia Wade, Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow, 2021
Kiese Laymon, Heavy, 2018
MOVEMENT BUILDING AND MEDITATION Grace Lee Boggs, The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, 2011 adrienne maree brown, Holding Change: The Way of Emergent Strategy, 2021
LIBERATION
Aja Monet, My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, 2017*
Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, 2015*
RIGHT TO MIGRATE
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move, 2016
Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, 2019
Rinku Sen with Fekkak Mamdouh, The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization, 2008
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 2016* Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, 2012*
LOVE AND DREAMS adrienne maree brown, Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, 2019 Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing, 2016 Robert Jones Jr., The Prophets, 2021 Tayari Jones, An American Marriage, 2018
MUSIC AND ART Ashon Crawley, Blackpentacostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, 2016
Harsha Walia, Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism, 2021*
RACIAL CAPITALISM adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, 2017 Marc Lamont Hill, We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility, 2020* Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America, 1983* Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 1983 Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1972
Robin DG Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 2002
PHOTOS
Shana Redmond, Anthem: Social Movements and the Sound of Solidarity in the African Diaspora, 2013
Photographs by Ray Neutron and Christian Padron
Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, 1998
Top left: Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts, Untitled, from the Redaction project, 2019–present
7
CREDITS The Healing Project at YBCA is organized and curated by Meklit Hadero, Chief of Program; Martin Strickland, Director of Curatorial Projects & Public Experience; Fiona Ball, Manager of Curatorial Projects & Public Experience; and Minerva Ramirez, Program Production Manager. Funding for The Healing Project is provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Art for Justice Fund, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors. Additional support is provided by the Creative Capital Award, Unbound Philanthropy, Open Society via the Soros Justice / Art for Justice Fellowship, and Sundance Institute’s Interdisciplinary Program with a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. YBCA Programs are made possible in part by MacKenzie Scott and Dan Jewett, #StartSmall, California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, Marilyn Conrad Trust, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Tambourine, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the National Endowment for the Arts, Walter & Elise Haas Fund, The Bernard Osher Foundation, Meridee Moore and Kevin King, The Sato Foundation, and YBCA Members.
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA) is San Francisco’s center for art and progress. Opened to the public in 1993, YBCA was founded as the cultural anchor of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens neighborhood. Our work spans the realms of contemporary art, performance, film, civic engagement, and public life. By centering artists as essential to social and cultural movement, YBCA is reimagining the role an arts institution can play in the community it serves. Our mission is to generate culture that moves people.
SCAN HERE for a full list of interviewees and collaborators:
YBCA is grateful to the City of San Francisco for its ongoing support.
PHOTOS
Yerba Buena Center For The Arts 701 Mission Street | San Francisco, CA 94103 415-978-2700 | ybca.org
Front cover: Claude Johnson, Kassim Norris, Christian Padron, Samora Pinderhughes, Ray Neutron, Masculinity, 2021 Photographs by Ray Neutron and Christian Padron