POVA IN THE NEWS: Caring Magazine - Artists and Allies
Poverty and the Arts diminishes class lines and offers community.
Kateri Pomeroy, 63, has lived on the streets over two years. Arthritis limits her mobility, let alone her job prospects.
Art provides solace.
“I find it spiritually soothing…[and] therapeutic, especially when you’re in a homeless situation and the stress is just bad alone,” she said. “It helps release tension and anger.”
Pomeroy started her art career in Tennessee through the Nashville-based Poverty and the Arts.
Created by Nicole Brandt in 2011, Poverty and the Arts is part of an on-campus community service project at Belmont University, hosting community art days where volunteers and homeless artists create art together. This year the organization obtained nonprofit status.
“Being a music city, we have a bunch of creatives that come and are growing [in number] and we have a ton of musicians that have come and don’t make it and find themselves on the streets with different problems,” Brandt said. “I felt like there was this need in Nashville. There was nothing set up where we could all just be equal.”
The biannual community arts days in March and November evolved to include four branches of the arts: visual arts with creating and discussing art in response to a prompt; music in a “jam session” of various instruments; creative writing to pen stories and poems together; and theater with improv games. Poverty and the Arts then hosts showcases of the art created or performed at community arts days to raise awareness of homelessness.
“Our mission is to break down class lines and empower the homeless community through the arts,” Brandt said. “The idea is that our volunteers get a chance to create with our homeless participants versus typical us-versus-them service opportunities, and through that experience they get to see our homeless participants as creative and talented and have meaningful conversations.”