Why Daybreak Arts Matters
Nashville Is a Creative City. Everyone Should Have the Opportunity to Be Part of It.
Nashville is known around the world for its creativity. Music, visual art, performance, design, and storytelling are woven into the identity of our city. Yet access to Nashville's creative community is not equally available to everyone.
Daybreak Arts exists at the intersection of two important realities: Nashville is a creative city, and many people in our community experience homelessness and housing insecurity. We believe those realities should not be disconnected, so we’re trying to bridge them.
A Creative Ecosystem, Not Just an Arts Program
Homelessness affects far more than where someone lives. It disrupts someone’s access to community, creative expression, sense of belonging, social networks, and opportunities to earn income. Even though people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity have talent, potential, and passions, they are often denied the access, resources, relationships, and opportunities needed to develop their strengths and fully participate in their communities.
Daybreak Arts works to change that by creating opportunities for people to cultivate talents and pursue creative passions that may otherwise remain out of reach. We sustain an ecosystem of access, relationships, experiences, and opportunities that artists can use to pursue their own goals. Within this creative ecosystem, artists can explore their talents, develop their creative practice, connect with community, share their work, and pursue opportunities to earn income.
Our Approach to Homelessness
We begin with what people bring: their creativity, talents, experiences, interests, and potential. Through the Daybreak Artist Collective, seniors and adults experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity have access to creative space, supplies, learning, community, resources, experiences, and opportunities to share and earn from their work.
This is a different way of engaging with homelessness. Rather than seeing people only through their needs or circumstances, we create opportunities for them to continue developing the parts of themselves that homelessness can make difficult to pursue. That might mean having a place to create, learning a new skill, developing a creative practice, earning income, sharing work with an audience, or receiving recognition for something they have worked hard to master.
Creating Connection Through Creativity
Daybreak also creates opportunities for artists to participate in the broader Nashville community. Through exhibitions, performances, workshops, commissions, field trips, creative partnerships, youth programming, and the Shared Walls Art Program, artists connect with schools, businesses, cultural institutions, affordable housing communities, and audiences throughout Nashville.
These interactions create opportunities for people to encounter Daybreak Artists through what they create and contribute. An exhibition, performance, purchase, workshop, or commission can shift the relationship from seeing someone through the lens of homelessness to experiencing them as an artist, teacher, performer, maker, or creative professional.
Our goal is not simply to provide an arts program for people experiencing homelessness. It is to create access to opportunities, relationships, and communities that should be available to everyone—and to make it possible for people to contribute their creativity to the life of the city.
Through our Exhibition Partner Network, artists bring their work into spaces beyond traditional galleries. Through creative opportunities, they can teach, perform, demonstrate, and share their expertise.
We believe a more inclusive response to homelessness includes making sure people have opportunities not only to receive support, but to create, contribute, connect, develop their talents, and be recognized for what they bring to their communities.
Investing in Nashville's Creative Identity
Nashville's creative identity should include everyone. Daybreak Arts expands who gets to be part of that identity by creating opportunities for people who are often excluded from traditional arts spaces because of income, housing instability, lack of formal training, or other barriers. We also give the broader community opportunities to see talent where they may not have expected to find it. A Daybreak Artist can be an exhibiting artist, a paid performer, a teaching artist, a commissioned artist, a mentor, or a creative collaborator. Those opportunities change how artists see themselves—and how the community sees them.
Why This Matters in Nashville
While Nashville has a strong network of arts organizations and community services, the people, resources, and systems within that network can often remain separated. Daybreak Arts helps connect those worlds, by creating opportunities for people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity to participate in the city’s creative life while building relationships, developing their talents, and pursuing economic opportunity through their work.
Daybreak connects:
Arts and Housing
Creativity and Economic Opportunity
Artists and Audiences
Professional Development and Lived Experience
Individual Expression and Community Connection.
For more than a decade, we have demonstrated that artists experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity have talent to share, creative work worth experiencing, and contributions worth investing in. As Nashville continues to grow, Daybreak Arts is building the infrastructure to make those opportunities more accessible—with a new creative home, an expanding network of partners, and a growing ecosystem of programs that helps artists move from creating to developing, connecting, sharing, and earning.
Daybreak Arts is helping build a Nashville where creativity is not limited by housing status or income—and where everyone has the opportunity to contribute to the city's creative life.