Kelly Ann Graff describes her work at Cheekwood Estate & Gardens as a “dream job.” The Belle Meade mansion sits at the intersection of arts and outdoor education, and it offered Graff a stable salaried position in the small, competitive field that combines her experience, training and interests. Until last month, Graff helped manage the nonprofit’s education programming, working with schools to set up field trips and organizing Cheekwood camps.
Graff’s co-worker, Natasha Gibbs, moved to Nashville from Michigan in 2023 specifically for a job running Cheekwood’s garden education programs. Gibbs had previously worked at another botanical garden in Michigan. These types of jobs are few and far between, Gibbs explains, contributing to a competitive professional environment.
“ I was a garden educator on Cheekwood’s education team doing youth programming, primarily working with Title I schools in Nashville doing a vegetable gardening program,” Gibbs tells the Scene, two months after she quit. “As time went on, it started to bother me that we were blatantly taking money from places like Tractor Supply Company and CoreCivic and doing DEI work with that money. It felt kind of like we were laundering that money to make ourselves look good and to benefit the people who were donating.”
Winters were slow, and Gibbs spent some of her downtime researching Cheekwood. She was particularly appalled to learn that the Cheekwood board’s executive committee includes Alberto Gonzales, the former U.S. attorney general under George W. Bush who helped legally justify warrantless surveillance and torture methods in the years following 9/11. In the summer of 2024, Brentwood-based outdoor outfitter Tractor Supply Company — Cheekwood’s lead corporate sponsor — abandoned carbon reduction goals and DEI efforts. After the fundraising office asked Gibbs if TSC executives could observe one of her youth programs and Gibbs declined, she says the incident became a blemish on her next round of professional feedback. She began to see other small incidents — like when a group of non-paying, majority-Black youth working with Gibbs at a summer program had to eat lunch outside in peak summer heat so as not to “mix” with paying campers inside Cheekwood’s air-conditioned dining facility — as a pattern.
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“ It seemed to me like the higher-up staff were hiring young, often queer and left-leaning people because they liked their ideas in theory,” Gibbs says. “In practice, the priority is always on bringing as many kids through the program as possible, as opposed to providing them with a quality program. In some ways there is a valuable service being provided, but ultimately they’re doing more for us than we’re doing for them.”
Gibbs quit in July. Graff quit in August, citing many of the same political differences. Cheekwood has since scrubbed its own DEI efforts, which it fashioned under the “IDEA” acronym, from its website. After she gave her two weeks’ notice but before her final work day, Graff says she was shut out of an IDEA committee meeting she normally would have attended. She had recently found out that her work was funded directly by Brentwood-based private prison operator CoreCivic.
“I am quitting my job as the School and Outreach Programs Coordinator in protest against Cheekwood’s financial relationship with CoreCivic,” Graff wrote in a written statement to Cheekwood executives. “CoreCivic is one of the major contributors to the prison industrial complex that creates the wealth and access disparities our educational programs are intended to address. Addressing these issues of access while directly benefitting from their causes is performative and hypocritical. Cheekwood has demonstrated that funding is more important than standing against the active and escalating violence against the Black and Latino communities across the country at the hands of CoreCivic.”
The billion-dollar corporation has boomed under the Trump administration as a leading contractor for immigrant detention facilities. Cheekwood was not forthcoming about this controversial funder to employees, Graff says; she suspects the organization didn’t want her raising the issue to like-minded IDEA committee members. CoreCivic regularly appears on Cheekwood’s annual report as a corporate sponsor.
Cheekwood’s small Education and Outreach office has lost two more employees — a volunteer coordinator and an education programs supervisor — since Graff left. Churn is common at nonprofits — low pay and long hours are often justified by employees who believe in an organization’s philosophy and positive societal impact, a nonmonetary benefit formally known as “psychic income.” According to Cheekwood’s recent job postings, particular positions offer actual income under $50,000 a year.
Graff says the additional departures were influenced by herself and Gibbs, though their former co-workers declined interviews requested by the Scene, as did Nathalie Lavine, Cheekwood’s Education and Outreach vice president. Both Graff and Gibbs recall numerous emails, conversations and meetings with Lavine to raise issues related to Cheekwood’s conservative ties, and describe her as sympathetic to their concerns. They perceived institutional opposition from Lavine’s boss, Cheekwood CEO Jane MacLeod, who also declined the Scene’s interview request. The organization instead provided a statement via PR firm Finn Partners highlighting its multicultural festivals, free field trips, free and reduced admissions programs, and work with Metro Nashville Public Schools.
“These programs are vital as Cheekwood carries out its mission of nurturing the spirit and serving as inspiration for a diverse and broad audience,” reads the statement. “None of it would be possible without the generous support of our equally diverse visitors, members and donors whose partnership is a ringing endorsement of our work to ensure all are welcome to experience the treasure that is Cheekwood.”
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MacLeod — then Jane Offenbach — was “famous for saying she has a dollar sign tattooed across her forehead,” wrote Scene arts editor Laura Hutson Hunter in a prescient 2011 cover story describing the institution’s attempts to chart a new, financially stable path under its new CEO. Hunter termed the tension between this manicured, old-money Belle Meade mansion and the boundary-testing newness that defines contemporary art the “Cheekwood conundrum.” MacLeod’s tolerance for change extends to what can make the nonprofit money, former employees say — an appetite that includes multicultural festivals like El Día de los Muertos and the Black Arts Bash.
Nashville’s independent arts scene considers moral and political questions imperative. Small enterprises like Drkmttr and The Packing Plant explicitly ground their work in identity inclusion and frequently host events elevating topics like reproductive rights, immigrants’ rights and gun violence. Cheekwood has deliberately avoided such topics by stipulating that artists-in-residence avoid political work. Next year, it will dedicate its community week to “Americana” and feature a spring display titled Red, White and Bloom, according to former employees.
These choices have created a vast philosophical gulf between independent artists (and collectives) and major arts institutions like Cheekwood and the Frist. A similar conflict played out amid last year’s Metro Arts Commission controversy over the equitable distribution of city grant money. The saga coincidentally involved then-Commissioner Will Cheek, of the wealthy Maxwell House family that bequeathed Cheekwood, conspicuously supporting the city’s major arts nonprofits. It was Cheek, an attorney, who raised legal questions in July 2023 about including racial criteria as an element of the city’s funding formula. Within months, the dispute polarized the city, prompting lawsuits and resignations; Cheek left his post the following March.
