On the third floor of the Nashville Public Library's main branch downtown, behind a glass door labeled "Teens," there are indeed teenagers galore casually walking around and socializing in Nirvana band tees, ripped jeans and beanies. The left side is for the many who just want to chill and do homework. But the right side is where some 1,000 local teenagers gather throughout the month to show off their artistic talents.
The occasion is a program called Studio NPL, where teens can share their creative abilities with their peers and explore different careers and opportunities through teamwork. Starting in 2013, the library gained grants and funds from the MacArthur Foundation, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Memorial Foundation. With the help of these organizations and others, it secured studio equipment, instruments and mentors to guide anyone ages 13 to 18 who sought a place to express themselves — without any cost to the participants.
The result is Studio NPL. Depending on the day you go, the library is already a combination movie theater, video and record store, concert venue and gallery space. To that list you can now add recording studio, creative workshop and multimedia lab. So far there are six main branches, with the others situated in Green Hills, Bellevue, Madison, East Branch and Southeast Nashville (augmented by a mini-studio at Bordeaux along with mobile labs). The only thing students are encouraged to possess is a library card.
On this weekday afternoon, mentors from Southern Word, the local nonprofit that encourages teens in underserved communities to develop their spoken-word skills, team up with participants in Studio NPL's Cypher, a program that offers support for teen MCs, rappers and poets. The idea is to push young artists like poets Cassidy Martin and Sheliagh Simmons out of their comfort zones, giving them the freedom to fly, fail, experiment and learn. They can talk about home lives, depression or anxiety; they can freestyle about fish as friends, or about rappers with "DOPE" written across their hats.
"Studio NPL is a safe place where we can share our feelings, backgrounds and burdens that is not put under a magnifying glass, and then eventually spill them out in a microphone," says Martin, who also serves as a Southern Word intern. She says Studio NPL gives her, and others, a creative outlet through its music and writing workshops.
Southern Word founder Benjamin Smith, a Studio NPL mentor, says students who come to the workshops regularly have grown and sharpened their writing, whereas it's harder for teens who attend infrequently to get the right coaching and improve. The many young participants are encouraged to perform their own poems and songs in front of thousands of people at events, and Cypher plans on taking its mobile group on their first Wedgewood-Houston walk during this weekend's Art Crawl to advertise its digital workshops and 3-D printing.
Mentors waste no time teaching Studio NPL participants that it's acceptable to be distinctive and weird. Their teenage protégés regard them with respect, though it sometimes takes unusual forms — like the affectionate ribbing students give music guru Saran Thompson, the Antioch hip-hop artist who records under the name "S-Wrap," and who's a popular Studio NPL mentor.
Studio NPL hopes the Cypher program will encourage students to develop technological skill sets in digital workshops that might lead to career pathways. At the same time, its mentors want participants to show who they really are by developing the art that expresses them best. Ultimately, that means young musicians, MCs and rappers could go into the Studio NPL program and get the resources they need to lay down their own indie recordings — making the program an incubator for emerging Music City talent.
"As new as we are, there are not a ton of achievements coming from the students yet," studio coordinator Niq Tognoni tells the Scene. But he says to watch the studios for progress in the near future.
Studio NPL's talent pool is fed by Southern Word, whose participants will compete 7 p.m. Saturday at the State of the Word summit of young spoken-word artists at Blair School of Music's Ingram Hall. Last year, Southern Word had three high school finalists compete for the title of Youth Poet Laureate: Cassidy Martin, Lagnajita Mukhopadhyay and Lemuel Robertson. Mukhopadhyay took the prized trophy — a book deal with Penmanship Books — and went on to perform her work in different cities. So far, Southern Word has reached 4,000 students in schools, and its poets have performed at TEDx Nashville, competitions in Atlanta and Philadelphia, and even at Mayor Megan Barry's inauguration.
Studio NPL is steadily expanding via new studio spaces and events such as the Poetry Flows Middle School showcase Dec. 9 at East Nashville's Y-CAPS. Beyond that, it plans events for summer 2016 at several local universities, along with activities throughout the year listed online at library.nashville.org. The audio production suite at the main library will be open 3 p.m. Friday; teens in grades 9-12 can reserve time at the Studio NPL desk. Check it out — after all, it's a library.
Email arts@nashvillescene.com
