Podcast Part 2: Applying Anti-Racist Frameworks in Government Agencies
with Daniel Singh, Lydia Yousief, and Sangreetha Ekambaram
In mid-March, a legal debrief publicized by Daniel Singh, the Executive Director of Metro Arts Nashville was brought to the attention of GIA. The document outlined the ongoing battle between the arts council and the city’s government. When the Metro Council did not pass Metro Arts’ FY 2024 budget, they met to reassess their funding, during which the majority of the council supported their anticipated surplus of $2 million to be dedicated to Thrive artists. The Thrive program seeks to “connect artists and organizations with the community to create investments, cultural connections, and transformations,” and supports many artists of color. Five days following the Supreme Court’s decision barring affirmative action practices or considerations in university admissions, Metro Arts was challenged by Metro Legal that, “their actions violated the Equal Protection Clause, and, therefore, were unconstitutional,” as a result of the race-conscious data and discussion. This led to a revote which resulted in a decision to cut the already promised funding to Thrive program recipients.
In this podcast, GIA program manager Jaime Sharp spoke with Metro Arts Nashville Executive Director Daniel Singh, and two grantees, Lydia Yousief, Elmahaba Center, Director, and Sangeetha Ekambaram, Multidisciplinary artist and Western classical singer. We explore how public funding can continue to center artists of color following the barring of affirmative action practices or considerations in university admissions, the importance of speaking up for your community and acknowledging artist labor, and how funders can hold themselves accountable and maintain awareness of their complicity.
Recorded on March 27, 2024
To listen to the full episode, click here.
Jaime Sharp: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a podcast by Grantmakers in the Arts, a national member association of private and public arts and culture funders. My name is Jamie Sharp and I'm the program manager here at GIA. I use she/they pronouns, and I am located on the unceded territories of the Three Fire Peoples, also known as Chicago, Illinois.
While this is an audio medium, I do want to take a moment and provide a visual description of myself. I am a light-skinned Black femme with shoulder-length, dark curly, natural hair. Thank you so much for listening in today.
Part two of Applying Anti-Racist Frameworks in Government Agencies features a conversation with myself, Metro Arts Nashville Executive Director Daniel Singh, and two grantees, Lydia Youisef and Sangeetha Ekambaram. If you haven't already, I highly encourage you to listen to part one of this podcast, which is now available on the GIA Reader site.
In part two, we continue our exploration as to how public funding can continue to center artists of color following the overturn of affirmative action, the importance of speaking up for your community and acknowledging artist labor, and how funders can hold themselves accountable and maintain awareness of their own complicity. I hope you enjoy.
Lydia and Sangeetha, I want to hop back to you. So in your previous responses, you mentioned that this issue is a lot bigger beyond just the Thrive program, but addresses systemic issues in arts funding and beyond. Why do you feel that it's vital for funders to gather race-conscious data to inform their funding allocation? As artists of the global majority, how do you feel these considerations have supported you and your work or conversely, when that data is not being paid attention to, how has that worked against you? I know that's been mentioned a little bit in the long history of Metro Arts, but maybe if you have any other examples or want to dig a little bit more into the importance of that in this current situation?
Lydia Youisef: This is a really important question too because I think a lot of folks, especially the commissioners are volunteers and that makes them very susceptible to not doing their homework and also not knowing a lot of the alternatives and being in a pool of their own society, of their own making and not branching out. So I have a lot of experience with grant writing and, obviously, as running a non-profit. I will say one of the things that has always struck me about a lot of the general operating small or medium nonprofits that get funding through Metro Arts has always been the entitlement to those funds. It's just a completely different lens than the way I operate. I know a lot of small organizations led by people of color operate. I get a ton of rejections and I don't expect people or any type of funder to say, "Let's give this small rig a chance."
So it was just fascinating to me the sense of entitlement and the guarantee to the funds, especially since this is tax funds, so it should be distributed. If there are any funds that should be distributed equitably, it should be tax funds. So that was very fascinating that I felt like a lot of White-led nonprofits have a very different lens to how grants work that, "I should just get this grant because I'm an arts organization," and there's no question as to what your programming is or your leadership or why is a White-led org in North Nashville in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and what is-
One of the things that's also really fascinating, when Metro Arts added the equity question long before Daniel came on the scene, this is how they thought equity would work is adding an equity question to the grants application. Fascinatingly, you can imagine what do White-led institutions think equity is. Teaching Black people music, and there were applications that literally said we are teaching them Mozart. We are going into Latino communities and giving them opportunities, and we are going to get translators so that way we can translate our work because the poor Spanish-speaking people do not understand our art forms.
So that's not what equity is, obviously. That's colonialism, straight up 18th century Europeans being like, "Let me go to Kenya, let me go to Egypt, and let me teach these heathens what European art is." It was a lot of, "We're going to take these kids downtown to go see what a concert hall is," because this is unimaginable art forms because we don't have that and we don't create that and we don't fund that ourselves.
In essence, and I had this conversation with Metro Arts staff back in 2021 where I said, "Do you understand that when you are not specific and race-conscious, you're not equitable. You are reframing colonialism and you're actually making it much, much worse. So you are allowing the majority of the funds to continue to go to White people to do things in our communities that should not be tolerated, and you're giving them more access to funds to harm us." That's what's happening with Metro Arts. We're not talking about something sweet and cuddly and a cute little opera. We're talking about exploitation and tax funds being used to exploit communities of color in particular.
So that to me, the funding model that happened at Metro Arts pre-Daniel, that's what happens when you're not race-conscious. It's just exploitation and it's just feeding into the colonial project so that White people can get funds to uplift their culture and their arts at the detriment of us losing our culture, our arts, and being indoctrinated that this is high arts and our language, our art forms are not important and don't deserve funding and don't deserve to be preserved.
So that to me is what's at stake is pushing against exploitation and pushing against this narrative that you have to be in the Frist, in a museum or in a concert hall to be considered an artist within our communities. I'll say Elmahaba, our funders are all race-conscious. So the people who support this work and have brought us this far through our direct services and our campaigns have all been race-conscious, and they have made the deliberate choice to say, "We need to support BIPOC leadership in BIPOC communities, period. We are not going to support people outside of the community coming into a community and telling them what to do and what needs to get done."
So I think that that should be the obvious route for every funder. I think that it's worthwhile, and I think not doing that, you also create issues where you create monopolies too, coming back to capitalism. So whatever sector, whether the arts or immigrants rights, one of the issues we have here in Tennessee is because funders, they only want to fund large organizations just like Metro Arts, what happens is that we don't get anything done. So we get these organizations who take millions of dollars to do immigrants rights, and you see what's happening in our state, millions of dollars for civic engagement. You see what's happening in Tennessee. It's abysmal.
So you have all this money getting pumped in to the city and to the state at large for equity, for anti-racism, and it's going nowhere because there's an investment in people who are not from the community in very large-scale organizations that create these monopolies, and their whole goal in getting these funds is to make sure they retain them so the little guy has to stay little. So it's not collaborative, it's not coalition-based. It's a monopoly system within the nonprofit structure.
Sangeetha Ekambaram: I would just say I'm just building off a lot of what Lydia just shared, that just even thinking about this Thrive data and that the fact that this vote wasn't deliberately made based on race but it was to move money more into independent artists of small and micro organizations, but that that inherently had an impact on BIPOC artists. So I think what that actually reveals is that White supremacy is enacted in the structures of the artistic institutions in town, and that simply more BIPOC artists are actually involved at a micro level and in local communities. So I think being race-conscious is also being conscious about the ways in which structures are created, the ways in which our participation actually starts to build these structures based on White supremacy that then create these inequities.
I think just as an artist, as a multicultural artist, I have participated in a wide variety of artistic dance and music. I was a cultural anthropologist before, especially focusing on minority rights and resistance movements. So actually, from the simplest level of individual empowerment to how groups actually operate and using music and art to fight for their rights, you see how power dynamics function at the micro level and then how that actually builds into larger structures that either maintain the status quo or challenge the status quo.
By that, I'm not trying to be fancy, but I'm just simply trying to say that we are constantly engaging in power dynamics. We're constantly enacting and reenacting either White supremacy or equality or these things in our everyday lives. It's important that race-conscious data simply show us that just the collective consciousness about what we consider to be art, it constantly challenges us to think about that.
So just when I talked about at the moment being interested in creating a new structure, that is primarily what myself and my colleagues are trying to do is how do we create something that is self-sustainable, that is mutually supportive of other people and creating these micro economies that we can slowly start divesting ourselves of this more harmful White supremacist capitalist structure that very much shows up in the arts.
I think even the grants editing panel last summer, I suggested maybe making a list of qualities of White supremacy as it shows up in the arts in particular because I think there are other fields of study that have done this more, but not so much in the arts. I think even if we do one thing, sometimes in our imagination we might hold a more White supremacist idea of what art is, even though we might not show that in our everyday lives. So that would be interesting. So I think it just has more implications beyond just the race-conscious data, but also to the structures that are produced and reproduced.
Jaime Sharp: Thank you so much, and I love that. I just made note of it. How does White supremacy show up specifically in the arts? I think it's a very interesting question. I think, Sangeetha, we have similar backgrounds. I'm also a classical vocalist, so I've seen that in action. I like to call myself semi-retired for that exact reason.
So Daniel, hopping back to you. So I'm here in Chicago, but I came across this debrief on LinkedIn, which speaks to the power of just transparency around these conversations and broader online connections. You've gotten into it a bit in your previous answers, but what was your initial goal in publicizing this legal debrief, and what are maybe one or two takeaways that you hope funders, especially those in the public sector, gain from this? Then I'm also wondering, has it evolved your goal of sharing this since you initially posted it? Have you received any type of feedback from the funding community?
Daniel Singh: Thank you. Thank you for that question. I always ask myself, how do I facilitate fair and just opportunities for the different expressions of the peoples and artists in Nashville? I want them to be well-resourced, visible, and thriving. It connects directly to Metro Arts' vision. The reason I wanted to put it out in the public is because we can't fight this battles alone. People always talk about Nashville as this glorious blue dot in a red state. I would say if you want to be very generous, maybe we are purple, maybe, but it's almost red state.
Just a few weeks ago, we had a Nazi rally in the downtown in Nashville. So there's that. There are others who are working in the space in small, small glimmers of hope in very conservative environments, and I want them to see if they can learn anything from this, and I want to learn from them too. If someone else is doing this work, I want to hear from them and say, "How did you get through this and how did you survive? How did you keep your job?" I want to learn from them too. So that's one of the reasons I wanted to do this.
I'm incredibly isolated. So they've taken Justin Lang and Dana Parsons away from me because they knew they were the ones who were helping us think through and architect this work together. Staff have been mobilized against me. Legal has given them a whistleblower protection so they can say whatever they want and they can do whatever they want for who knows for what promises. I don't know what legal finance and HR have promised staff. So I'm really isolated. So another reason to put this out in public was to find community for me in this moment of incredible isolation and also think through how others entering this work might protect themselves and build a community they need.
I was really, really lucky that we had Arts Equity Nashville here advocating for the artists, and others might not have that. So can they learn from that? How do we get artists mobilized and organized and how do we fund them? They should be funded like a union organization. They're burning candles on both ends. They're all gig workers. They're all pulling multiple jobs, teach-ins at 9:00 at night or Sunday afternoon at 5:00 PM because that's the only time they can get the collective together. We need to be paying them, and how do we pay them? The unions have been busted since 1980s in the Reagan era, and so there's no one organizing in the artist space as a union and supporting them. So I want to get their voice out as much as what I'm doing because the artists really are the ones doing this work for us.
Apart from what Arts Equity Nashville is doing, there are several other peer organizations like Black National Assembly is doing really important work. Southern Movement Collective is doing important work on the ground here. The Middle Tennessee API community and Coalition is doing important work because there's a vacuum, and rather than waiting for these large government structures to do it, they're going and doing the work. So it's important to lift up those voices for me.
Some of the other things, the reason I wanted to get it out as well is I am trying to constantly question my own complicity and internalization. I kept looking at the data, and for a long time, I couldn't figure out why something was bothering me in our funding history for 35 years. Finally just in the last three or four months, I was able to articulate it is because Fisk Jubilee Singers, 150-year-old legacy organization, Grammy Award-winning, whatever you want to put label next to them, they have it. We have never funded them at Metro Arts because we said we won't fund anyone affiliated with the university.
We did similar things and we said, "We won't fund anyone affiliated with a religious organization. We won't fund anyone affiliated with the educational organization." So we found ways to rationalize why we won't fund arts that are not operating in Eurocentric large concert halls, which are just participatory, as opposed to the community-centered bookmaking or come together make a recipe together or those forms of people-driven, community-driven art forms, we found Metro Arts has found a way, and I take responsibility for that for not funding it. So I was asking those questions.
Similarly, if you want to look at even the endowments of colleges in Nashville, Fisk has been around. It's one of the oldest institutions in Nashville. Their endowment's at 36 million. Vanderbilt, which was built 10 years after, has a $12 billion endowment. So you can't tell me that it's longitude. You can't tell me it's not legacy or quality. This is racism. This is White supremacy at work. I needed to get these stories out. So if others are doing this work, I can connect with them and learn from them.
We're also looking at how we can talk about place keeping and place making in Nashville, and I want to learn from others who are doing this as if people didn't exist there. So there's Elizabeth Mrozek and Paxton Waters in North Nashville who talk about the history of the highway cutting off the Black community from the rest of Nashville. Not only did it cut the rest of the community off, it also split the Black community in half. So communities that could walk across and see the grandparents now would have to take a bus into downtown and take a bus back into the other side just because they're separated by 50 feet, really, because they didn't own cars and there were no bus services. So this is intentional sabotage of communities, and this is how the history of slavery continues in our midst.
Nashville is also the home of CoreCivics. It's the private prison population. So what's happening is that we are privatizing education. Nashville has a huge number of private schools because when segregation happened, White families didn't want to have the students attend school with students of color. So education. We had a health equity office. It got taken down because the director did there. Stephanie Kang was trying to move in the anti-racist direction and they couldn't have that. So that got folded down.
Prisons are being privatized. Rather than investing in the community, you're giving money to people like CoreCivics who have a 90% bed guarantee payment. So regardless of whether the beds are full or not, they're getting paid. So I just feel like so many things are getting privatized and now they're looking at privatizing arts.
So guess why they don't want to have the grant process or open funding process in '25? They can give year marks to the organizations they want to fund. This is why it's White supremacy. This is why it's connected. This is why it's all really important for us to think about it. Often, large organizations trot out numbers like we bust in 37,000 Title IX schools. I'm like, "That's what DEIA gives you. You can just bust in and say 37,000 students." The anti-racist question is why when we had a surplus of $130 million last year does a Title IX school exist in Nashville? That's the question for me. Why do you have a surplus and why do you have excellent credit ratings and then you still have Title IX schools or communities" That is the anti-racist question for me.
This is why I'm putting it out in the community. This is why I think we all need to be in dialogue because Justin Lang often talks about the Zapatista movement and how we can't take down the wall of racism, but maybe if each one of us is aware of what the other is doing and we decide, "I'm going to put my wedge in here. Can you put yours just about five feet from mine so together we get some collective power?" If you are 50 feet from mine, this wall's not going to fall, but if we can all align a little closer as movement builders, as coalitions, then maybe the wedges will eventually make a chink in this wall of racism and we can break through and get on the other side.
Then the last point I want to say is that people always romanticize the arts and talk about the arts are about imagination, the future, utopia, and I'm like, "The arts are also rooted in labor." We used to be rooted in labor, used to be side by side with the union, singing, fighting, and our work was considered labor. We were in resistance spaces. Think about people like Nina Simone, Mississippi Goddam. Yes, she was part of the Harlem Renaissance, but she was fighting. She was not just singing lullabies or random stuff, not that lullabies don't have a tradition or hold a space in our world.
So I really want to end with that, that arts are not just about imagination. They're rooted in labor, they're rooted in resistance, and like true resistant fighters, they should shift and adapt and constantly push against the co-opting that's happening in the Motos DEIA world because the biggest detractors I have, the biggest weakness I have in my work is that when someone says, "Why can't you get along? Why can't you look like this city or why can't you look like this DEIA leader and just get along and do things in a way that's amicable? Why do you have to be so combative?" and that has been the hardest battle for me. I hope by putting this out there, we can say that they're actually propping up the status quo and we need a new way of doing what we do in the arts.
Jaime Sharp: That's incredible. Thank you so much for sharing. So this is my last question for Sangeetha and Lydia. So of course, congratulations are in order seeing as you did receive full funding, which I love it, but what do you feel? Daniel mentioned Arts Equity Nashville helped a lot throughout this process, but what do you feel are best practices, specifically for funders because that's our audience here at GIA, to support artists, especially those of color in similar scenarios, especially when we're thinking about situations that are a direct result of the Supreme Court's decision to outlaw affirmative action. What suggestions would you have for folks or maybe what tactics have been used throughout the past almost a year that you felt really helped and supported you?? Whoever would like to ... Sangeetha, would you answer or, Lydia? Either way.
Lydia Youisef: I think the big thing for Arts Equity Nashville is that we spent a very ... Not everyone was on board with what was happening, especially in the early months. We also got told a lot, a lot there's no reason to be filing any complaint, any Title VI complaint. The government is a racist institution, so there's no reason to go through all this trouble and spend all these hours. I live by the Zora Neale Hurston quote of, "If you don't speak up, they will kill you and tell you that and make up their own narrative about what happened and say that you liked it."
So I'm very big on we didn't have too many expectations on this, but no matter the circumstances, we also have to be very cautious of the narrative and make sure that the narrative that we have is a narrative that comes through is the truth will be spoken. So I feel because of that was our ethos from the beginning, that no matter if White supremacists decide to give us some money or decide to reconcile at any level, that wasn't the goal. The goal was to make sure our voices were heard and that the truth prevailed at the end of the day.
So that meant a lot of community conversations. That meant a lot of ... As you can see, there were a lot of dates, a lot of things that were happening, a lot of procedures that are not happening. One of the things that I have appreciated about this process is that people have come up to me and said, "Because of this, I now know Metro Legal exists, and I didn't know that about my government, and I didn't know that this was a government that Metro Legal is also involved in Cop City, is also involved in the new Titan Stadium here in Nashville, and using taxpayer funds for private industry," et cetera, et cetera.
Now, we've snowballed into revealing and exposing who these White supremacists are. Will Cheek has become a household name as well, the commissioner who went to Metro Legal and has sided the overturning of affirmative action. So that to me was the most important part of this is that we did so much work in terms of exposing a lot of the government entities that were complicit in this and making sure that people who had this rosy vision, especially of our mayor, our newly elected mayor, and this sense of all is going to be well is to have a larger conversation with Nashville and say, like Daniel was saying, "Are we the blue dot in a red state?"
I think that that was something that a lot of people in my space and myself were saying for a very long time about living in Nashville that this is not a blue dot, and that has finally become normal rhetoric here, mainstream. It's about to become mainstream rhetoric to say the city has a lot of problems and a lot of systemic problems, and it's not as progressive as we imagine. We don't have sidewalks at the very base of the city. No one can connect, and we live in a segregated city.
So for grant makers in particular, I would say one of the things that stunned me about Metro Arts when I was first engaging with the staff was the criteria that in order to apply for general operating funds, you had to be a, quote, unquote, "arts organization". When I asked them what does it mean to be an arts organization, they said, "Only doing arts." That was extremely disappointing because Elmahaba is one of those orgs that we have arts programming, but that's not all that we do. We have a diaper bank, we have tutoring, ACT classes, and support a lot of newcomers, and we do live streams, resource navigation.
So to me, that was such an offensive statement to say that people who don't come to the diaper bank or people who go to a diaper bank and need support when they have the baby, they're not artists. You have to be a 9:00 to 5:00, someone who goes to a concert hall and performs to be considered an artist and to receive that funding and support, but the mom who has her baby and she paints or she needs paint supplies or the factory worker who does carpentry on the day that he has off and he comes to the community event to tell people about it and to show folks about it, these are not artists because they're working class peoples or because they need mutual aid.
So that to me is something really important for grant makers to keep in mind that the organizations that are building power, I think, tend to be a lot more dynamic because they have to be, because they're responding to the community than just doing arts. I refrain from saying just doing art because I think that it's much bigger than that, and like Daniel was saying that art is labor.
So there's so much happening and so much that the community can benefit from when we are funding dynamic, and we're also funding ecosystems as well. That is something that really annoys me about grant makers as well is that they may say, "Oh, I really like this organization and so I want to fund it," but there's no sense of the partnerships and coalition building and the ecosystem that you're creating when you are funding certain organizations.
So those would be the two things. It's consider the community, consider the ecosystem, and consider much larger than the arts, but knowing that the arts are much larger than themselves too.
Sangeetha Ekambaram: I'm just thinking about this, I want to maybe tie the word imagination in with labor and reality because I think the way we imagine the world affects the way we show up, the way we act, what we choose to see, what we choose not to see. I think a lot of this, the work with Arts Equity, this Title VI complaint, I just showed imagine what would happen if we did something that's never been done before despite all the voices that are like, "This is the way it is. This is just the way the world is." It's always going to be just imagine if we had not moved forward in action with the imagination that maybe something could happen.
I think just in terms of funders, just simply, I think for all of us, it's about examining our own imaginations about the possibilities of art, what art actually is. I'm expanding it to a lot of what Lydia is saying that art is tied to culture for most the majority of communities. It's actually the majority. Only a small minority, which are normally people that own our large institutions, imagine art as a commodity that they can exploit to make profits off of. So artists are never prioritized. They're always the last to be considered with ...
You know this as a classical singer. I think the opera world is the epitome of White supremacist capitalist values. It's an absurd industry. I think anyone who's participated knows that, but the imagination is artists really don't have any value other than what we can extract from them. Their individual voices don't matter. We have an idea of it. Even the art doesn't matter at the end of the day a lot of the times, but that's a whole other story.
So I think just for funders, expanding our imagination, but by doing that, expanding imagination of what artists, but by actually looking at what is happening on the ground, that the majority of art making is happening throughout the city within cultural contexts and by small organizations, individual artists, by working class people who always aren't always tied to large institutions, but are still making it happen, but just imagine if we were to fund those projects and allow people to do their creative side of life freely. So that's what I have to say.
Jaime Sharp: That's wonderful. Thank you both. So I just want to open the floor for any final closing thoughts, if you'd like to give us some more information, Lydia and Sangeetha, on how we can explore your work and support you. I know, Daniel, you also had something that you wanted to add if you want to start.
Daniel Singh: Sure. I wanted to think about why we are where we are. So we always thought that we could be the unique group or the unique agency that could figure out how to work within the capitalist system and be anti-racist. I think in the long term, we have to figure out how to move away from capitalism to socialism or whatever next iteration we need to move to and we always thought we could do it.
One of the ways I think we got here was because the NEA said, "We're not going to fund individual artists and we're only going to fund non-profit." So the non-profit industrial complex was created, and it's all intentional map laid out around the Reagan years. It's not something that happened accidentally. It was intentionally attacking the places where thought and labor and resistance was happening. So that created this whole mass of non-profits.
The other thing that we did was we latched onto this creative economy model to say that artists are also providing value, but I'm like, "Wait, what are you saying? Are you saying that you're also a commodity and you're part of capitalism by saying that?" because the creative economy model, which I really, really fight and struggle with, is that always talks about how much creative economy impact it creates.
If you talk about the average person buying a $60 ticket, the family of four parking for $42 in Nashville, and then going in and watching the show or having babysitters watching the kids going to a restaurant, think about all of those places you touch in the creative economy. All extractive practices of labor, restaurant is one of the most extractive, not even minimum wage. They get $3 in tips. Then parking, attendance, same, very, very extractive, minimum wage. No restrooms in the parking, container booths, and all of that. Babysitting, same thing, often undocumented people of color are recruited into babysitting.
So you latch arts onto such an extractive project and then say, "Oh, look, we are contributing to the creative economy." I think we have to really examine these internalized oppressions that we've become a part of. We can't go on doing this and then saying, "Why are we struggling?" Well, you made this happen. You subscribed to the creative economy model for 40 years. You subscribe to the nonprofit model for 40 years, and now we are here because of that. So change is going to take time, but it can also happen fast. The pandemic showed us that we could make change quickly. The disability community had been asking for that for over 50 years since the ADA was passed, but still, it didn't happen until the pandemic affected abled people.
So I think it's really about finding the collective power and artists in Nashville often talk about taking over spaces, and maybe that's what we need to do. We have to show that as voters, we have power and we have to use our power and not assume that we don't have it. So I think that's been a harder conversation to have is because you have to own your complicity and your own internalized piece in this all. So that's something I wanted to just name.
Jaime Sharp: Thank you so much. Lydia, Sangeetha, do you have any final thoughts that you'd like to share?
Lydia Youisef: I want to shout out Daniel because I feel like he's had to run this race in a different way than we've had to. So we've had a very strong collective and we've been able to speak very openly about what's going on, how we feel, and to have a community that's like, "Okay. Let's think about this," or, "Let's reframe this," or, "I have something to add about that," and I have felt that he has not had that. As you can tell from what I've been saying, very pre-Daniel and pre-Daniel Metro Arts, and he's made that stance for the arts community here in Nashville. I think it will go on to be like this one person pre-Daniel and what's happening through Daniel.
I will also say, I want to also give him credit that so many other departments have their eyes on what's going on at Metro Arts, other Metro Nashville departments, and they're watching what's happening to Metro Arts and what Daniel has been doing because it has so many implications for the way other departments want to work.
So I have information from Metro Health that this same conversation about direct funds and how much you can fund directly community members to do the work has come up in other spaces. The Office of Community Safety, the health department, the Community Review Board, the state has collapsed. So they all have their eyes on this, and I feel like they've hinged a lot of their bets on, "We hope Daniel makes it through," this one person.
I want to say that because I think very much the collective is the most important in getting something done and in working together and in putting the wedge, but I think recognizing the individuals who have put themselves on the line, and maybe a lot of people who are silently in the wings rooting for you and saying, "I hope he makes it through. I hope he gets through this so that the collapse doesn't happen to the other Metro Nashville departments and Nashville spirals more than it already has," is major.
So I want to say thank you for your contribution to Nashville. I don't think it's over, personally. I think that that speaks to the power of someone being brave. My sister always says to me, "To love is to be brave." So I try to hold that in times that are really hard to prioritize love and to prioritize the collective and to say, "I need to be brave for the people who can't speak out, for the people who it would threaten their livelihood or their finances or their families to speak out." So to love them is to be brave.
Sangeetha Ekambaram: I'm going to piggyback off that because it's absolutely true. I think I've had so many conversations with artists recently that I'm collaborating with that are in the community about this whole situation, and they are very much grateful and also just really encouraged by what has happened over the last couple months. They were like, "Yeah, Daniel came in it to do a job and he's doing it," and they automatically, because they've lived with these realities their whole life, know the truth of the situation.
So I will say from my perspective, there is community. I think everyone this work is allowing people to focus on their work and be in their microcosms and build their own communities, and that is already happening. I just want to acknowledge that because that's something that we can be blinded to because it is really hard work. I know it can feel isolating and sometimes feel like, because there's a few voices that will just come very actively against it, and it feels like ... It's like, "Why? Why speak out against this work at all?" but in the communities that I've talked to, it's a lot of just feeling very encouraged by these recent developments.
Daniel Singh: Can I just thank Reverend Davie Tucker at MHRC and his Director of Policy Ashley Batchelder. They've been amazing allies in doing this extensive report, just two people that reviewed over 18 months of meeting minutes, recordings, talking to staff and commissioners and artists, and 65 artists co-signed the six artists who put in their grievance with MHRC. MHRC has really been the biggest wedge in making this come to fruition. So I really have to hold them up in this moment.
Jaime Sharp: Thank you again to Daniel Singh, Lydia Youisef, and Sangeetha Ekambaram for joining me in this fruitful conversation. As a reminder, if you have not had a chance to check out part one, it is now available on the GIA Reader site.
Thank you for listening to the Grantmakers in the Arts podcast. If you have any feedback about today's episode or the podcast in general, please contact me at jamie@giarts.org. That's Jamie, J-A-I-M-E @ G-I-A-R-T-S dot org or visit our website, www.giarts.org. Be sure to check out the other episodes of our podcast on reader.giarts.org and find us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram at Grantmakers in the Arts. Thank you again for listening.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Lydia Yousief is the founder and director of Elmahaba Center since June 2019. After graduating with her master’s from the Center of Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Chicago, Lydia returned to her hometown, Nashville, to support Arabic-speaking families in their pursuits of economic stability and cultural revival. By training, she’s an ethnographer and storyteller.
For Sangeetha, music and art are most meaningful within the context of community, rituals, and the parties that contain and celebrate it. In her work, she is most interested in creating and participating in communal spaces where these activities occur on regular basis. She considers herself fortunate to have an interdisciplinary and multicultural background that has led her to a variety of rich projects and collaborative relationships. Recent performances in Nashville include: producing and performing as both singer and dancer in an original adaptation of Ravel’s “Shéhérazade”, “Imagining Scheherazade in Exile” in collaboration with Reza Filsoofi, Jennifer McGuire, Sally Bebawy, Geeti Shrazi Mahajan, and Becca Hoback, in Daniel Arite’s “Fabric of Sound” with multi-cultural musicians, and “Peripheral Convergence” with Joi Ware and other celebrated local artists for OZ Arts Brave New Works Lab, and “Fuego Flamenco Cante” with renown San Antonio-based singer, Chayito Champion. In more traditional western classical repertoire, Sangeetha has performed several solo and collaborative concerts with such artists as Jennifer McGuire and Alessandra Volpi. Outside of Nashville, Sangeetha recently performed with the New York Chamber Music Festival and Metropolitan Opera Guild, and collaborated with such artists as Craig Ketter and Anthony Gian diTommasso. In her spare time, she loves to keep singing, dancing, moving, spending time with people and staring into the abyss of possibility.
