Samora Pinderhughes’s Call and Response at MoMA: Art as a Practice of Collective Healing
Blending music, film, testimony, and community collaboration, the multidisciplinary artist transformed MoMA’s Kravis Studio into a space for confronting incarceration, structural violence, grief, and the possibilities of collective care.
What if art could do more than represent suffering? What if music, film, and performance could help people reclaim their stories, acknowledge grief, and imagine alternatives to systems built around punishment?
These questions shaped Samora Pinderhughes’s Call and Response, presented at The Museum of Modern Art in New York from January 24 to February 15, 2026. The project brought the multidisciplinary artist’s work into the Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, combining live performances, a new film installation, and community-centered programming. Although the exhibition has closed, its central proposition remains urgent: art can create a space in which difficult experiences are heard, shared, and understood collectively. <Cite refs={[“turn902362search0″,”turn902362search1”]}/>
Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines social and political issues through sound, image, language, and collaboration. His work frequently addresses incarceration, racism, poverty, and other forms of structural violence. Rather than treating these subjects as distant policy debates, he centers the people whose lives are shaped by them.
In Call and Response, that commitment became both an artistic method and a social proposition.
Listening Beyond the Museum Walls
The exhibition developed from Pinderhughes’s work with The Healing Project, a community arts organization he founded to collaborate with people affected by incarceration and structural violence. During his 2025 Adobe Creative Residency at MoMA, he expanded this practice through partnerships with community organizations across New York City. <Cite refs={[“turn902362search2″,”turn902362search17”]}/>
These collaborations included Brotherhood Sister Sol, the Fortune Society, Parole Prep, and South Bronx Unite/The Land Stewards. Each organization works within different community contexts, but their involvement reflected a shared interest in giving people opportunities to tell their own stories and imagine alternatives to the conditions they face.
The resulting project was not simply an exhibition about social problems. It emerged from relationships with people and organizations working directly with those problems.
That distinction matters. Museums often present political issues through objects, photographs, or documentary material viewed at a distance. Pinderhughes’s approach instead asks how an institution can host a process of listening and exchange, bringing artistic experimentation into contact with community experience.
His concept of a “sonic healing room” suggests a different kind of cultural space: one in which music, testimony, and shared attention can help people encounter difficult experiences without reducing them to statistics or headlines.
Music as a Form of Testimony
Live performance formed a central part of Call and Response. One of its major works, I Hope This Finds You Well, brought together a choir, musicians, and audio recordings to tell stories about healing from structural violence. The performance used music and spoken testimony to create connections between individual experiences and wider social conditions. <Cite refs={[“turn902362search0″,”turn902362search4”]}/>
Pinderhughes’s musical language draws on the emotional immediacy of song while allowing voices and experiences to coexist. A musical arrangement can hold several perspectives at once: an individual voice may emerge from a larger ensemble, while the collective sound can provide support without erasing personal difference.
The result challenges the assumption that testimony must take the form of a conventional interview or documentary statement to carry authority. Music can communicate feelings that are difficult to express through formal language alone. Rhythm, silence, repetition, and harmony create ways of listening that engage audiences emotionally as well as intellectually.
Yet the work does not suggest that performance can solve the institutional problems it addresses. Its more modest and potentially powerful claim is that gathering, listening, and artistic expression can create conditions for recognition and connection.
Improvisation and the Unanswered Question
Another major performance, We Welcome the Moments When Our Questions Have Not (Yet) Found Answers, approached uncertainty through musical improvisation. Pinderhughes invited collaborators including Chief Xian aTunde Adjuah, Joshua Crumbly, Jack DeBoe, Nick Hakim, and Toshi Reagon to respond to selected texts through music and performance. <Cite refs={[“turn902362search6″,”turn902362search7”]}/>
The title points toward a form of engagement that resists easy conclusions. Political and social crises often generate demands for immediate answers, even when the underlying questions involve generations of harm, complicated histories, and competing experiences.
Improvisation offers a different model. Performers listen, respond, adjust, and make decisions in real time. The music develops through exchange rather than following a completely predetermined path.
This process resonates with the exhibition’s wider emphasis on collaboration. A call requires a response, but the response does not need to be identical to the original statement. Difference can become part of the exchange.
Within the museum, that principle extended beyond sound. It suggested that meaningful engagement with difficult histories requires attention to other people’s experiences and a willingness to remain present when certainty is unavailable.
REAL TALK: The Human Cost of Incarceration
A new film installation, REAL TALK, remained on view during museum hours. The two-channel work combined narrative fiction, archival footage, music, and interview clips to examine the effects of incarceration on individuals and their communities. MoMA described the film as asking what it means to grieve someone who is still living. <Cite refs={[“turn902362search0″,”turn902362search2”]}/>
That question captures one of the exhibition’s most affecting themes: loss does not always follow death. Incarceration can separate families, interrupt relationships, reshape a person’s sense of identity, and leave loved ones navigating absence while the person they miss remains alive.
By bringing different forms of moving images and sound together, REAL TALK challenged the narrow narratives through which incarcerated people are often represented. The combination of testimony, fiction, archival material, and music created room for a more complex understanding of lived experience.
The film’s structure also reflected Pinderhughes’s broader practice. Rather than relying on a single authoritative voice, it assembled different kinds of evidence and expression, inviting viewers to consider how personal stories interact with the systems surrounding them.
Its subject is deeply political, but its emotional center is relational: what happens to families, communities, and bonds of care when punishment becomes the organizing principle of a social system?
A Museum as a Place for Community Care
The Kravis Studio is designed to support live art, experimental media, performance, and other practices that extend beyond conventional gallery display. Call and Response used that environment to bring together music, film, conversation, and public programming. <Cite refs={[“turn902362search1″,”turn902362search3”]}/>
The project also challenged the idea that a museum’s role is limited to preserving objects and presenting established cultural narratives. Here, the institution became a setting for encounters among artists, community organizations, performers, and audiences.
A related public program, A Celebration for The Healing Project Artists, included screenings, listening sessions, and conversations with collaborators connected to the participating organizations. The program made visible the community relationships behind the exhibition rather than presenting the finished artwork as an isolated achievement. <Cite refs={[“turn902362search10″,”turn902362search19”]}/>
Such partnerships also raise important questions. How can institutions support community-led work without appropriating the experiences that give it meaning? How can the benefits of cultural visibility extend beyond the museum? And what happens after an exhibition ends?
There are no automatic answers. Sustained relationships, shared decision-making, and respect for participants’ agency remain essential if institutional support is to become more than a temporary platform.
Beyond Punishment, Toward Possibility
At the heart of Call and Response was a question that reaches beyond the gallery: what would it mean to build a society organized around healing rather than punishment?
Pinderhughes did not present art as a substitute for structural reform. Instead, he used music, film, testimony, and collaboration to make room for experiences that are often marginalized in public discourse and to imagine different ways of relating to one another.
That approach gives the exhibition its lasting significance. The work acknowledges that systems of violence produce consequences that cannot be understood solely through policy language. They affect bodies, families, memories, and the everyday ability to feel connected to other people.
By bringing those realities into a museum, Pinderhughes invited audiences to reconsider what art institutions can do—and whom they should serve.
Call and Response was a temporary presentation, but its central idea reaches beyond its dates. Listening is not a complete solution to injustice. It can, however, be a beginning: a way to recognize people as more than the circumstances imposed on them, and to make collective imagination part of the work of change.
