Ashley Howell, executive director of the Tennessee State Museum, told the Nashville Business Journal

Introduction:

Howell: 
Digital Revolution
For us and many other organizations, the pandemic challenged our business plan as an attendance-driven field. We made an early shift to digital. That was something we were already working toward, but the pandemic really prompted us to go all in.
Now, so much of our programming is hybrid programming. We have programs on site and have the ability for our digital attendees to view them in real time. We archive these programs on our website as well. We are continuing to think about our statewide service through a digital format. Now, we are calibrating what we do in-person versus what we do digitally. We are thinking through content for social media and websites to shift how we serve. The pandemic spurred these changes forward in a rapid way. That has been a great benefit.

Art & Business

When you are attracting companies to move here, they are looking at what is here for their base. They are considering whether this is a place where families can live and thrive. They are also finding out if they can enjoy going out on a Friday or Saturday to engage with the community and culture. Our cultural institutions are a big part of that.

Education & Business Now
For the workforce development conversation, we must talk about what we’re doing in our schools and how the arts institutions here in Nashville help to positively impact that. Many of our arts institutions are working with students in schools and doing community engagement and outreach to enrich opportunities for students to learn and develop new pathways for thinking and learning.

Community Rules

I think about contemporary art and seeing the sort of shifts of the gallery scene in supporting artists in the area.
The community always finds a way to support what people perceive is missing. That is always a part of the conversation about what is next. Because I look at things from an arts, culture, and history lens, I will say that I’m heartened by efforts to preserve Nashville’s history.

Funding

I have worked for private organizations as well as public. From that experience, I can say that it is important to engage with donors, truly sharing why the institution you represent should continue to be funded. That also applies to earned revenue opportunities. If you are selling a T-shirt or concessions, those sales support the mission of your organization and present opportunities to share your mission with the people who choose to donate, buy tickets or shop for merchandise.

Future Trends
We have seen a higher engagement with historical topics. As we talk about current events, the question is, has this happened before? Or is there a reference? Looking at COVID, people were asking about the 1918 pandemic. So, we have seen an increase in engagement of history. We aim to share the stories you know and the stories you might not know. It is important to understand our past because it helps inform us about the future.

As we look at the future of the arts over the next 10 years, I personally see us working to engage technology in such a way that makes sense for our community to be able to access the arts. That really provides us with a lot of opportunities, especially where potentially there’s a lack of footprint of the arts, to give people the chance to see what’s available in Nashville and to really create different opportunities for our audiences to interact.

We can also create augmented reality. The Gateway Chamber Orchestra in Clarksville is creating augmented reality. Their audiences can go in and see what all the musicians are doing. That again is another opportunity for engagement for us as an artform, to invite audiences in.
Imagine sitting at a live music show and being able to pull up your phone and see a dance to that piece of music. I think opportunities like that will exist for us in the future. I perhaps see an inverse relationship of where we film a piece of dance and then share it out to people experiencing dance for the first time through a digital platform. Then, when they see it in person, they can realize that the experience is just that much more magical. That is how I’m seeing it all coming together.
Nick Mullikin, artistic director and CEO, Nashville Ballet.
Mullikin: 

Collaboration
We talk about collaboration in this city, and I think it would be wonderful to see multiple venues and institutions working together to create a vibrant, centralized arts festival here in Nashville. I would say that is one thing that is missing and presents one of the biggest opportunities. There are disparate festivals that exist across several different spaces here, but when I think of a big city, I think of an arts festival taking place over a weekend, or maybe even a week. I would really love to see how our institutions could come together to gather into one space. The Nashville Dance Festival came about from this idea of needing to have a celebration of everything that we do here.

Funding
I was fortunate enough to be at the Metro Council meeting recently, where they reallocated about $10 million more dollars to the arts. We are incredibly grateful for Metro Arts to receive that funding. I believe that puts us at about $4.25 per patron. A city like Austin has about $9 per individual patron allocated. Comparatively, the civic funding that exists in Nashville is low. It would be great if we could continue to find a way for a city that values its cultural institutions to continue to find new ways to allocate more resources toward that.

Artist Support

We also need to be able to continue to support the artists who want to live and work here. It is key to find what that funding looks like. In the 2021 Creative Economic Survey, 25 percent of Nashville artists indicated that they were not planning on staying in Nashville because they couldn’t afford to live here. We need the long-term funding to be able to bring creatives to Nashville, support them and show them how important they are to the city that is relying on them to drive the economic engine of what it is that we do here.

Within our organization, we have 32 artists that we employ full-time as professional ballet dancers. They are striving to achieve a standard of living. They have committed their entire young lives (hopefully, until their mid-30s if they are injury free) to this art form to enrich our community, help educate our students and help to do so many other things. As an organization, we want to continue to give back to them in the best way that we possibly can. We currently struggle to do that.
We have sort of a “creative drain” happening here in Nashville. The rising cost of living makes it challenging for us to be able to recruit the talent that we want because we are not able to sustain them.
Great Programs
Of course, I work in a museum, but I am also a consumer and pay attention to what’s happening. I’m going to [Tennessee Performing Arts Center] and the Frist and the Nashville Symphony. In the cultural landscape, just the number of offerings in the stories that are shared, the exhibitions, programs and performances; the increase in engagement overall is just so fantastic.
I am a believer in the way dance is ideally going to evolve from the classical aesthetic to being more contemporary or cutting edge. To that effect I would have to say it’s OZ Arts Nashville right now that is the most interesting for me in terms of the programming and how the artists are bringing in are challenging what the creative field is capable of and the partnerships they are establishing. I’m a regular patron of Oz, and I’m excited about what they are doing.