Sam Gould

An artist, writer, and editor, Sam Gould co-founded the cultural collaborative Red76 (2000 - 2015), an artistic and social configuration on the forefront of the burgeoning movement that became known as Social Practice. Focused on ideas around publication as an act of public making, his work often centers aspects of sociality, education, and encountering the political within daily life. In 2015 he established Beyond Repair, an “expanded publication,” functioning as a long now site of questioning and social collaboration with the aim to move past the rhetoric of “people and places that need fixing,” and towards a space of reflective self-determination and collaborative creation among his neighbors in Minneapolis’ 9th Ward. In the orbit of Beyond Repair he co-founded, and is director of, Confluence: An East Lake Studio for Community Design in March 2020. An incubator for Social Craft, Confluence Studio believes “People make place. Neighbors make neighborhoods”

Gould was a founding faculty member within the MFA Dept. for Social Practice at the California College of the Arts, the first such department to be established in the United States, as well as a full-time visiting professor in Text and Image Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was a recipient of a 2014 McKnight Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship, a 2017 Forecast Public Art / McKnight Foundation Mid-Career grant, and a 2024 McKnight Foundation Community Engaged Artist Fellowship.

He has lectured extensively within the United States and abroad at institutions such as Harvard University, the New Museum, and SF MoMA; held residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, The Luminary, Villa Montalvo, and elsewhere; and has had projects commissioned by institutions such as Creative Time, the Walker Arts Center, Printed Matter, and many others.

Since 2014 he has committed to focusing the majority of his practice within walking distance of his home. His collection of essays on a shifting cultural landscape, America Composes Itself, was published in the fall of 2023 by Publication Studio - Hudson.