We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Jacob Richman. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Jacob below.

Alright, Jacob thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

One of the keys for me to keeping enthused about my work, is to make sure I balance gigs/jobs I need to take for the paycheck, with ones that I am excited about, that involve collaborators I love to work with, and that challenge me to grow and push beyond my comfortable skill set. Of course these two things aren’t mutually exclusive, and when you can get a substantial paycheck for a project you’re excited about, that is the best! But it won’t always come along that way, it certainly hasn’t for me. The key is balance. I heard Oprah tell a nice story about how when she was working on The Color Purple, she was having such a fantastic time, had amazing collaborators, and felt truly fulfilled as an artist, and that for all her work since she has been trying to recapture that feeling. The lesson I took from that was to remember my favorite projects, especially ones where I was working with a group of beloved collaborators, and to use that as a guide for how to build future projects. If you don’t have that one project in your mind yet, start one, and trust your gut. Even though every good project gets hard and you can get discouraged, you should be overall enthusiastic about continuing to work on it and help it grow. Give yourself a deadline, even just to show friends work in progress, that will help.

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 am a multimedia artist, scholar, and educator fascinated by the interconnectedness of things—sounds with images, places with memories, people with the natural world. I combine video, sound, and custom-designed multimedia to create fixed media pieces, performances, and installations that explore these connections that surround us. My research focuses on emerging media technologies, experimental performance practices, interactive installation, and activism through community-based arts. I have a thorough background in video and music production, creative coding and microcontrollers, experimental performance and installation, social practice art, media theory, as well as ten years’ experience teaching these subjects at the university level.

My work focuses on the use of video and multimedia in roving performances and installations in which audiences experience the pieces by moving through them, experiencing various combinations of elements in relief: video/sound, performers, and audiences moving with and against each other. I am interested in how this process can help express complex topics, such as personal and collective loss, and expose hidden connections through a kaleidoscope of changing combinations of sounds, images, and performers.

I am deeply involved in social practice artmaking, both in my own work and in my teaching. Tenderloin Opera Company is a homeless advocacy music and theater group that I have co-facilitated for over ten years. TOC tells the stories of homelessness in Rhode Island. The group is composed of currently and formerly unhoused people, their advocates, and friends. We meet weekly to tell stories, make art and music, develop characters, scripts, and songs that eventually become operas that we all perform together in venues ranging from shelters and meal sites to academic conferences in marbled halls. My decade-long experience with the opportunities and difficulties of community artmaking has shaped all other aspects of my work as an artist and educator, in particular the questions of who I make art for, who is able to experience it and take part, and how I can better amplify the voices of my partners, collaborators, and students.

Is there something you think non-creatives will struggle to understand about your journey as a creative?

I don’t like the terms “creatives” and “non-creatives.” I think it is a product of our capitalist society that tries to separate aspects of our humanity into commodities that can be taken advantage of by those who wish to exploit others’ labor for profit. Every human is creative, and for folks who are not “professional” artists, it can be scary or daunting to practice art or to be creative. Everyone should spend some of their day being creative, being playful, which is to say being human! Whether that is doodling in a note pad, singing karaoke, taking dance lessons, all of this should be better supported by our society. On the flipside, being considered a “creative” can be isolating. It takes that universal experience and separates us from the rest of our community and requires us to commodify and produce “creative work” to serve others who wish to profit off of it. While I hope these broader issues can be helped and resolved soon, in the meantime, everyone should learn to value and nurture their own creativity and consider it a necessary practice of being in a human community.

How did you build your audience on social media?

This question is a bit of a silly one for me, since I am not good at building an audience on social media. Promotion is the last thing I think of when working on a project, and I know I would probably be more successful if I had more skill and did more work in this regard. So rather than giving advice, I am always open for advice from other artists on how they manage it. My difficulties are that I don’t feel I have the skill in this, and that I lack confidence in presenting myself as an individual artist. I’ve always been a bass player, I’m so more interested in being part of the band than the front person! I also struggle with a separation between doing the work and promoting the work. They feel like two very different tasks in my experience. So perhaps people looking for advice might find that they have similar difficulties as I, and think about how they can increase their skill and most importantly their JOY in presenting themselves and their work to others. My guess is that a good technique would be to find some way to link the excitement of the creative project to the presentation/promotion of that project: find someway to use that juice to make the necessary posts, etc. …Though in this case, perhaps do as I say, not as I do!

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.jacob-richman.com/

Image Credits
Headshot by Jonathan Pitts-Wiley (@jpittswiley)