POVA IN THE NEWS: Nashville Arts Magazine - Community Enrichment: Poverty and the Arts

Photograph by Jami-lyn Fehr

At a new studio in East Nashville, Poverty & the Arts expands mission of transforming people affected by homelessness into artists

By: Carrington Fox

It has been five years since Nashville Arts introduced readers to Poverty & the Arts founder Nicole Brandt Minyard, then a Belmont student who was putting a passionate theory to the test. As a community volunteer and college student, Minyard had become convinced that the most powerful thing she could do for people impacted by homelessness was to do something with them. So in 2011, she founded Poverty & the Arts (POVA) to offer opportunities for hands-on creativity to people who might otherwise lack the resources or encouragement to express themselves through art. In 2014, Minyard established Poverty & the Arts as a nonprofit that offered art supplies and a marketplace for POVA artists.

In a 2013 interview in this magazine, Minyard posed the question, “What would happen if homeless people were suddenly able to paint and play music and write in collaboration with other communities?” Five years later, Minyard and a collective of non-traditional artists have answers to that question.

“The biggest thing I’ve learned is how complicated and diverse homelessness is,” Minyard says. “Artists come from different places, homeless experiences are very different, and solutions to get out of homelessness are very different. I think it’s overwhelming how different our artists are, and they are all using art differently.”

A browse through the gallery at povertyandthearts.org reveals just how differently POVA’s artists manifest their creativity: Gwen paints bold colors on canvas; Amatullah designs murals and wearable art; Deuce focuses his energy with graffiti; Clinecasso works with Sharpie markers, and Miss B creates art through guided meditation, to name just a few.