Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Samantha Rise. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Samantha, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I wish that I truly understood the value of my creative capacity sooner! I’ve always folded my art into every position I’ve ever held – for me, creativity has always been an essential element of my vocation. I studied music formally, but when the time came to pursue it as a full time career, the combination of my love of public service -and if I’m being honest, my tendency to undervalue my artistry- it was often pushed to back burner while I took on positions that empowered others in their creativity. Through the uprisings in 2020, and through a series of event that led to the departure from my full-time arts administrator position, I found myself putting my weight down fully in my music, my imagination, and my performance skills…and discovered with delight that those things were strong enough and deep enough to carry me. We live in a time when the world desperately needs the fearlessness, the curiosity, the vulnerability, the audacity of artists…and I wish I’d allowed myself to lead with those parts of me from the outset, rather than holding them back, or trying to find time and space for them in between work. They are my best work!

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I’m samantha rise or sam rise (they/them), and I’m a black, gender-expansive performer, teaching artist, activist and human-amplifier based in Lenapehoking, known widely as Philadelphia. I believe that Creativity and Community are our birthright, and our primary technologies for healing, transformative justice and self-determination. My art practice occupies the intersection of these two technologies.

I’m an songcatcher and lyricist, weaving together the jazz, folk and movement music influences I’ve collected into an Americana tapestry dubbed “high-country soul.” I’m a also a devising artist, contributor and host to several experimental theater and cabaret companies, devoted to intimate, multidisciplinary offerings that dissolve barriers between artist and audience.

My art practice is inextricably bound to my identity as a Black, Queer, nonbinary person, in a world suffering from what I consider a lethal lack of imagination. In addition to my traditional performance, I’m a Direct Action facilitator, making musical space for radical relating and collective action.

Amidst the pandemic and uprisings of 2020, it became clear to me that whether or not we identify as artists, we all feel debilitated, unable to affect the infrastructures that support–or undermine–our right to thrive. The fearful, anxious energy of the moment felt like something to harness and redirect toward new possibilities, so I dedicated my personal and professional capacities to addressing our city’s austerity with imaginative, artistic interventions that inspire us to embrace the challenge and the opportunity of crisis.

I work as a consultant and facilitator with city service providers, frontline organizers, and arts organizations explicitly committed to social justice, which continues to shape and inform my own artistic practice. As a proud mentee of Philadelphia’s youth leaders, I have always centered the voices of young people in my work. Often told that they come at a deficit, the truth is that young people have the most at stake in our future, and the most trustworthy creative leadership we could ask for. My art and activism is obliged to stay attuned to their vision, and to leverage my access to resources and platform for their future.

However I approach the microphone–as a host, a soloist or on the frontlines, I reconcile communities to their own voices and agency, in contrast to a culture of disengagement. Most of the time, I use my art to encouraging people to re-embody their own musical capacities. The breadth of my creative endeavors does not make my practice a shallow one; I rely on the relationships I build across communities, coalitions and long-form creative partnerships to encourage my work to grow deep as it does wide.

I want to be an integral part of making the world we deserve: a world where each of us recognizes our creative capacity to shift power and catalyze change, celebrate our intersecting identities as rich harmonies rather than dissonances; where each of us feels confident, curious and courageous enough to lend each of our voices to a chorus of wider ecological belonging. My performances engage our capacity for complex connections, honor the profound grief of our time, and invite us to the challenge of the radical revisioning and reconstruction.

I believe our survival is dependent on our ability to imagine ourselves into the future, and how empowered we feel to make that future possible. Toni Cade Bambara says, “the work of the artist is to make revolution irresistible.” There is no more essential goal for me in my art-making than to seed the pre-figurative principles that make equity, dignity, justice, and joy accessible, and to nurture those seeds by empowering audiences to exercise their own imaginations. The measure of my artistic efficacy is how much it allows us to deal, critically and creatively, with the necessary transformation of our world.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I am generally wary of social media – we’re living in an age where even our attention has been commodified, and we’re subjected to all manner of poaching, wandering unsuspecting through the social media, landscape. I worry about the ways it is changing our attention.

My social media reach has grown in large part to beign deeply engaged in community; circulating mutual aid and amplifying calls to action.

Also, creating content from an space on honesty and abundance. Reflecting on posts that have received the most engagement on social media, they’ve all come from moments of vulnerability, and moments when there’s a clear way for people to contribute or take action.

Inviting people into my own passions, worries, grief and joy allows people to connect to their own, especially through music and writing.

Offering a consolidated set of actions, tasks and resources for people within my community to engage with mitigates information overwhelm, and provides an achievable/quantifiable way to move toward a just future.

I’d also say the less I try to people please, and resist the urge to tailor universally acceptable posts, the more reach and support I’ve found in my social media presence. Authenticity, and constant calibration to my principles-outloud-have been very generative in bringing people to my music, and the work I value in the world.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Prioritize artists as public services in our communities, and compensate them as such!

Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy are some of the most powerful cultural (and economic) engines any community has. Major cities all over the country have generated incredible studies and reports to this end. And yet, when confronted with budget crises or other scarcity, cities often think of art as extraneous enrichment, rather than essential elements of a thriving society.

Recognizing that art is a primary driver for connection, capacity-building, and for change making, creating protections and representation for artists is an essential step for anyone interested in building accessible, equitable communities.

Prioritizing art and artists beyond entertainment- as a public service, as a community resource, as a social infrastructure- is a strong and powerful step toward building a safer, braver, more beautiful societies.

Contact Info:

• Website: samantharise.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/samantharise
• Facebook: facebook.com/samantharisemusic
• Linkedin: linked.com/samantharisemusic
• Twitter: twitter.com/samantharise
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJW9y0ZnxkNJ7UTg9UzXHfw

Image Credits
Senia Lopez ( first feature, 1&2), Galea McGregor (3), Ray Bailey(4), James O’Brien (5), unknown, unknown, Natasha Cohen-Carroll (8)