When Worlds Collide
Calling all creators: ambitious citywide arts summit seeks your input
by Jim Ridley
Last month, creative types across the nation almost lost their lattes when BusinessWeek.com and Sperling’s Best Places ran a list of America’s best places for artists. Considering a variety of factors, including diversity, cost of living, residents aged 25 to 34, and resources such as libraries, museums and orchestras, the sites compiled the top 10 U.S. communities for people who work in the arts. Right up there with New York and San Francisco—and, uh, Carson City, Nev.—was grand ole Nashville, Tenn.
Slow your roll, Picasso. Before you toss your gouache and your unfinished scripts into the U-Haul, ask some of the jazz players, dance groups, filmmakers, street-level galleries and fledgling theater companies that call Nashville home how easy it is to find an audience. Especially when, as the list claims, the city hosts 11.443 arts organizations per 100,000 residents. Nashville arts groups now find themselves competing not only with pro sports and the bottomless promotional pockets of the industrial entertainment complex, but also with each other.
Yet there is strength in those numbers too—the reasoning, in part, behind an ambitious summit meeting (co-sponsored by the Nashville Scene) this weekend that hopes to draw representatives from every arts group and discipline in Music City. On Saturday at the Belcourt, the first Nashville Arts Summit (NAS) convenes at 10 a.m., hosting sessions every hour devoted to a different facet of the local arts community. By getting a wide-ranging group of creative people in the same space, the organizers mean to encourage cross-pollination among all the arts—not just theater and music, but dance, fine arts, the written word, film and television.
Other events and entities create networking opportunities for local arts groups, from the Nashville Arts Coalition to the Metro Nashville Arts Commission’s monthly luncheons. The difference, says NAS producer Andy van Roon, is that the focus of Saturday’s summit is the input of the audience, with the people on stage there to facilitate discussion. While each hour will feature a panel of heavy hitters from more than 35 local arts groups—ranging from Nashville Symphony Orchestra president Alan Valentine, Nashville Opera executive director Carol Penterman and Nashville Shakespeare Festival artistic director Denice Hicks to filmmakers Coke Sams and Tony Vidmer, former state film commissioner David Bennett, Untitled coordinator Erika Johnson, longtime fine-arts patron Andrée LeQuire and Blue Moves Dance Group co-founder Amanda Roche—the idea is for them to preside over a kind of open forum, gathering ideas from an audience of their peers on topics such as promotion, sharing resources and the possibility of a citywide arts festival. These will be shaped into a formal study by Vanderbilt’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise and Public Policy and presented first before the Metro Nashville Arts Commission.
“The buzzword now in nonprofit arts groups is ‘partnering,’ ” says Casey Gill, executive director of Tennessee Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, who was involved in early discussions of the event. When artists who want to form a nonprofit in Nashville ask her advice, Gill says, she suggests they look first at existing groups that might benefit from their ideas. The NAS can point local artists toward a workable model such as the Frist Center, which Gill says “has been willing to partner with anyone from any genre.”
The worry with such a large first-time gathering, says one veteran Nashville arts staffer, is that it will derail into “a bitch session.” But Nashville Opera marketing director Reed Hummell says that “being able to build a rapport with other arts groups is always helpful,” citing the opera company’s successful collaboration with the Nashville Zoo on its blockbuster production of Aida. Put painters, hip-hop dancers, screenwriters and sculptors in the same room, and who knows what hybrid strain could emerge?
“We all acknowledge that we must stand together or flail,” says Denice Hicks, now in production on Nashville Children’s Theatre’s Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. “The resources and talent pool are limited in Nashville, so we must be cooperative and mutually supportive.” And if not—how’s the weather in Carson City?
The Nashville Arts Summit runs 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Saturday. The $5 admission supports the Belcourt Theatre. Representatives of every Nashville arts group are encouraged to attend, and fliers, business cards and brochures are welcome.
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