We were lucky to catch up with Ami Yares recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ami , appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

I consider myself a singer/songwriter, educator and in a slightly more existential vein, a healer and hope-raiser through my work with BuildaBridge, an arts and education non-profit — the later being a more recent discovery. Today, I remain an always aspiring singer/songwriter and someone who catalyzes art-making to help others achieve a greater sense of self.

How I arrived “here” has been an ever-evolving process.

I grew up with the arts all around me. As fulfilling as dabbling in music, visual arts and even a bit of acting and movement felt, my elders tended to characterize the arts as a profession in very static and traditional ways. You could either be a performer or an educator or maybe a combination of both. One would always have to win out on the other. If you pursued performance, it needed to be achieved at the highest echelon to be deemed worthy. To pursue arts education, meant to teach and train pupils to attain excellence in order to “perform” at the highest echelon.

While pursuing perfunctory quality should not be scoffed or disdained, I felt marginalized because as an artist, and in particular, a singer/songwriter, Jazz studies and classical music did not call to me nor the coveted halls of Berklee, NYU or the New School where “funkiness” found a higher level of acceptance.

While I benefited from my “traditional” music education and the educators facilitating it, I did not want to follow in their footsteps.

A fateful encounter with Micky Hart’s book, Planet Drum, introduced the field of ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicology is the anthropology of the music world. Through a culture’s music, I could understand society, its history and much more. I found the allure quite enticing and entrenched myself in Ethnomusicology. During my undergraduate studies. I felt such a kinship with music. Understanding music’s origins and societal value opened doors up beyond the commoditization and commercial exploitation that characterized my younger self’s worldview of music.

While Ethnomusicology opened my eyes to how music provides a spectrum of pathways to understand the world, it also helped me see the value of shared musical experiences helped shape the human experience. With this in hand, I began to use music to teach people about the world around them. Music from the Great Depression provided pathways to understand socioeconomics, and jazz improvisation became a metaphor for navigating life’s certainties and uncertainties. Arabic music became a fulcrum to bridge sectarian divides. Music connected me to people in ways the stage and classroom never had previously.

I traveled the world as a teaching artist. I combined my love of creative expression with my love for people and community and sought ways to perform, teach, facilitate and learn. I felt fulfilled. However, as time moved on, I could not sustain this rhythm of life and needed to find another way to thrive.

The penultimate step to where I found myself today came in the form of studying social policy. I had spent years focused on ways I could use music to improve the world and it became abundantly clear to me that the arts and art-making needed to become even more profound pillars of society. Arts and art-making stopped being about excellence and untenable standards. They became about access and accessibility. Technique and achievement could be much greater than perfection. Engaging with the arts and art-making meant societal cohesion, mental health and wellbeing and valuing the self-efficacy and autonomy inherent to the creative process.

I focused my graduate studies on Philadelphia and the thriving arts scene. I became a student of the murals blanketing the city, the plethora of performance and educational venues, teaching artists and the community hubs that provided creative spaces above crime, poverty, gun violence and the opioid epidemic.

Seridipidously, after finishing school – I found BuildaBridge or rather, BuildaBridge found me.

It has been seven years since I joined BuildaBridge and put my understanding of art-making and social policy into practice. Following a path blazed by BuildaBridge’s founders, Drs. J. Nathan Corbitt and Vivian Nix-Early, BuildaBridge has been providing restorative art-making programs to support the well-being of Philadelphia’s youth for over twenty years. BuildaBridge provides accessible ways for Philadelphia’s youth to experience art-making’s healing and hope-raising properties. While I believe every artist feels the benefits of art-making, BuildaBridge helps leverage the artist’s and art-making’s intrinsic power into a growth tool.

BuildaBridge’s Teaching Artists also understand the role of trauma and all of its manifestations (direct, vicarious, intergenerational). People are walking icebergs whose histories beneath the surface often determine how they interface with the world. Unfortunately, society can also misread a person who lacks the understanding and empathy to know a whole person beyond what is perceived visibly and outwardly. The response to this is BuildaBridge.

Art-making is a holistic response to helping people achieve an even greater sense of self through art-making.

Ami , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Whether I’m performing on stage, in classroom or community center, I want to make the artistic experience universal. Art-making helps people feel, In a world where it has become so easy to be numbed and dulled by the bombardment of media on our senses, art-making makes us feel alive, connected and grounded. People need to be able to access this on a regular basis, especially folks struggling in the world. A little moment of mindful creativity and ripple out goodness and become a beacon of hope.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Since I have unlearned the binary of being a professional artist, I have been able to learn more about the intrinsic power of art-making. Without stepping into expressive arts therapy, art-making is therapeutic. I don’t mean this in a medical way. Art-making is healthy, purposeful and needed. Artists access this in every creative endeavor and if this could be shared with people on wider scale, I truly believe that society would be healthier.

We need to do better to support our artists who share their creative practice with the community and in turn, also teach artists that they can support the well-being of a community through arts-based engagement.

Society does not value well-being as well as it could. People need more opportunities to engage with art-making for its intrinsic value and not for the sake of some lofty, unrealistic and mythical measure of excellence.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

Becoming a trauma-competent professional dramatically changed my perception of the world and the ways in which people engage with it. 67% of American society has endured a traumatic experience and sadly, society prefers we store our lived adversities far from the public eye. My work with BuildaBridge improved exponentially when I took two years to study with Lakeside Global Institute (LGI). LGI gave me the opportunity to understand trauma and even explore how I process trauma. Understanding trauma is essential to BuildaBridge’s work. Engaging communities with art-making also means addressing pain and histories left untouched and unresolved. Art-making is a powerful way to help people express how their body and mind cope with the tragedy of the past. Creativity and imagination offer the foil to trauma and that is to be hopeful and hope-raise.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.buildabridge.org / www.amiyares.com
• Instagram: amiyaresmusic & heybuildabridge
• Facebook: amiyaresmusic & heybuildabridge
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amiyares/
• Youtube: amiyaresmusic & https://youtube.com/@buildabridgeorg?si=rotH_Zn0kvi824iI
• Other: Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/2X6bQRuqA4C9qB4fkX9jcw?si=oWvjQ1HbTxGAKR78PxFGzA

Image Credits

See file names