A flyer about a potential development recently distributed throughout Edgehill
I was looking through the proposal for the North Edgehill Commons development, which would sit on the Beaman property at the corner of 12th Avenue South and Hawkins Street. The gossip is that many potential buyers of this property made their interest contingent on the zoning being changed before the sale was finalized, and one potential buyer did not. But if the zoning is not changed, that buyer would end up with a lot of parking lot. So now Edgehill is being littered with brochures talking about how awesome this development would be, if it comes to pass. The flyer I saw was urging people to contact the planning commission in support of the project.
The flyer also contains this little bit:
An intricate, communal “greenspace” honoring William Edmondson, life-long Edgehill resident and acclaimed artist.
A key feature of the open space is the playground, integrating large slabs of limestone for kids to climb on and scramble over, honoring artist William Edmondson and the history of neighborhood workers who would drop off leftover pieces of limestone for him to transform into pieces of sculptural art.
Sure. Who among us doesn’t look at a large pile of limestone and think, “Kids should play on this — nothing ever goes wrong when kids and rocks collide”?
The flyer then shows this limestone playground, and in it are oversized replicas of some of late Nashville artist William Edmondson’s sculptures. Judging from the conceptual art, these sculptures would be anywhere from four to seven feet tall.
I tried to figure out what each of these sculptures might cost, but it’s not easy to get a limestone estimate on a Sunday morning. Google suggests estimating $100 a ton just for the raw material. And then, of course, you need a sculptor who is able to work in large-scale limestone. And you know, it kind of doesn’t matter what the actual cost is. If it costs $10,000 per statue or $50,000 per statue, or even $1,000 per statue, that will be more than William Edmondson made from selling the statues that he actually carved in his lifetime — the ones that these sculptures would be based on. It will be more than his family has ever made off the sale of Edmondson’s works.
Neighborhood activists have been trying to get Edmondson’s home site protected and turned into a park and library for years now. But these are just regular people without massive developer dollars. They need the cooperation of Metro Schools, the library system, Metro Parks and a bunch of other entities, and they need all those groups to want to honor Edmondson even if it’s not without cost for them to do so. But they have plans the community has helped develop and supports. They have the support of the Edmondson family.
This — though it wouldn’t cost the city as much — doesn’t have the support of the family, and benefits the family in no way. It’s as if the developers knew they needed something flashy to get support for their development and discovered that the community is really eager to find some way to spotlight Edmondson and his role in the neighborhood. So they hitched their wagon to the cause. Which, fine, maybe that makes good business sense.
But there’s something unseemly about using Edmondson’s name and his art in order to make money for people who have nothing to do with William Edmondson. It isn’t cool and handy that Edmondson’s art was good enough to get him a show at MoMA back in the 1930s, but never garnered him the wealth he deserved. It’s unjust that the people who got paid for selling Edmondsons were the white people smart enough to collect it when he was alive and then held onto it long enough for more white art collectors to feel comfortable buying art by Black artists. All of these well-connected white admirers of Edmondson saw their small investments in his art pay off handsomely, and none of them helped his family figure out how to protect his intellectual property rights and benefit from them. And now here’s some more rich people swooping in to Edgehill claiming to value Edmondson while exploiting his work for their own benefit.
I’m not a lawyer, but flipping through copyright law, nothing about this situation strikes me as illegal. But it does strike me as gross. The one question we, as a city, should ask when someone comes to us wanting to “honor” William Edmondson is this: How is the family involved? Even if there’s no legal obligation to involve the family, we can still insist on a moral obligation to it.
Update: There will be a public meeting about the development at 6 p.m. Tuesday, June 15, at the Midtown Hills Police Precinct (1441 12th Ave. S.).
Update, June 17, 2021: Responding to concerns from neighborhood groups, developer Marquette Companies will no longer use Edmondson’s name in connection with the development.
