How Nashville artists are taking their fight for equity to the airwaves - Incite at Columbia University

In a city where just twenty large arts organizations receive roughly 80% of public arts funding, a grassroots collective is creating their own media platform to tell the story that local outlets won't.

Arts Equity Nashville, led by Assembling Voices Fellows Christine Hall and Lydia Yousief, has launched Public Comments, a radio show that provides a community-centered counter-narrative to artists’ ongoing civil rights battle with the city.

Following a 2023 campaign that generated over 12,000 letters to Nashville’s Metro Council, Arts Equity Nashville succeeded in securing $2 million in funding through Metro Arts' Thrive program. Thrive was specifically designed to support independent artists and smaller organizations, with 40% of applicants identifying as Black, Indigenous, or people of color. But when Metro Legal intervened to rescind the funding—citing the 2023 Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action in colleges—the group responded by filing a Title VI civil rights complaint.

The complaint highlighted how Metro Arts' funding decisions maintain art scene resources in the city’s downtown, often excluding communities across Nashville through economic and travel barriers. While large institutions receive hundreds of millions in state funding for capital projects, small organizations and independent artists—who often provide programming in underserved neighborhoods—receive around 0.17% of the city's arts budget. The complaint process has led to a conciliation agreement designed to restore funding, but the group's fight for systemic change continues.

"During this 12-episode limited series, we'll be building an artist-centered narrative to serve as an archive and roadmap of our advocacy," says Hall. The show, which is supported by their Assembling Voices Fellowship, aims to document their Title VI complaint process while exposing the systemic barriers that keep arts funding concentrated among the city's largest institutions. By amplifying their effort, the group hopes to counter local media coverage that often misses the deeper inequities in Nashville's arts funding landscape.

“My deep personal belief is that people closest to the problem are closest to the solution, and you create equity by distributing power to people who need it the most.”

In their first episode, “No Longer Self-Censoring”, hosts Lydia Yousief and Christine Hall interview Ellen Angelico, guitarist, former Chair of the Metro Arts Commission and CARE (Committee for Anti-Racism and Equity) about the history of inequities at Metro Arts and the reforms needed to fund the arts in Nashville. As former chair who advocated vociferously for artists in the Nashville community, Angelico discussed the importance of being able to effectively organize with members of the community as well as finding allies within the system to achieve the equity Metro Arts was designed to foster.

Beyond broadcasting their community’s story, Hall and Yousief are gathering data through a comprehensive survey of working-class artists in Nashville, examining wages, labor conditions, and accessibility. Their goal isn't just to document disparities, but to build a case for structural change, including a demand that 50% of grant allocations be reserved for local, independent artists and organizations operating with annual revenues under $500,000.

Public Comments airs Saturdays from 1-2 PM Central through April 2024. Episodes will be available for streaming on wxnafm.org for two weeks after broadcast, with permanent archives planned for on Arts Equity Nashville’s website. For those interested in supporting Nashville's arts community, the show provides an unfiltered look at their civil rights campaign, while a survey on their website will offer working artists in Nashville a chance to share their experiences.

Through both legal action and community-driven media, Arts Equity Nashville is ensuring that the stories of the city's working artists aren't just heard—they're driving change in how Nashville funds its creative future.

Public Comments is made possible by Incite Institute’s Assembling Voices Fellowship.