An artist, writer, and organizer, 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 whose aim is 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 Confluence: An East Lake Studio for Community Design with longtime collaborator Duaba Unenra. A incubator for Social Craft, Confluence Studio believes “neighbors make neighborhoods, people make place.”

Gould was a founding faculty member within the graduate department 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 at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He was a recipient of a 2014 McKnight Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship and a 2017 McKnight Foundation Mid-Career grant.

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, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and many others.