POVA IN THE NEWS: C615 - Main Street Gallery Blog: Poverty Q&A

Elementary Prayers by Ash-Shahid Muhammed

Poverty & the Arts is awesome. Here’s why: their goal is to empower homeless and formerly homeless individuals as artists and creatives by helping them generate income, job skills, security networks, and purpose in life.

They also use the arts to promote relationships and a space for volunteers to view homeless individuals as talented and creative, thus creating better advocates and more compassionate community members. Over the past few months, we’ve been displaying pieces from the organization in our Center 615 Main building. We sat down for a Q&A with Nicole Brandt, the brains and heart behind Poverty & the Arts.

Tell us the story behind Poverty and the Arts?

Growing up, the narratives told to me about homelessness were that the individuals were lazy, worthless, drug addicts that didn’t deserve the money of the government or its people. My senior year of high school, through the relationship of my best friend’s bus driver, I began spending time with homeless people in their camps. My first real experience with the homeless wasn’t in a soup kitchen or a shelter serving them. My first experience was being invited into their space, being a guest in their “home”. I learned that the individuals I fell in love with were not lazy or worthless. In fact, they were creative and resourceful–yet victims in the systematic and structural systems of oppression: poverty, racism, and mental illness. When I moved to Nashville 4 years ago to attend Belmont University, I wanted to recreate a space where people could genuinely get to know homeless individuals, rather than believing the perpetuating myths surrounding them. I explored what it would look like to use art as the conduit for volunteers to see homeless individuals as equals. We hosted our first Community Arts Day in November of 2011 and both the homeless participants and volunteers asked for weeks about when we would be coming back. The organization grew out of those relationships and people. Today, we host regular Community Arts Days for Nashville’s homeless community at large, and work closely with a small number of homeless artists recommended by the staff of local homeless organizations. Through the support of the community, we are able to provide resources for our artists to generate income through creating and selling artwork.