Statements

Mission

abrasiveMedia exists to help artists grow, connect, produce, and give back to their communities. We like to say that we're not an arts organization, but an artists' organization. We believe that people are the greatest works of art. By supporting people who make art, we support the arts!

We incubate big ideas from artists (of all kinds) who can benefit from a safe place to birth their stories and grow them until they are strong enough to stand on their own. We particularly love helping to create platforms for our artists to share their passions for social justice as well as art that comes from a place of profound vulnerability.

We are based in Nashville, Tennessee. Since 2004, we've served over 350 artists and helped them get their work in front of over 30,000 audience members. Because we work with artists from many backgrounds, we have developed systems and processes to make collaboration across genres a positive and life-giving experience.

Background

abrasiveMedia was founded in 2004. From 2004-2010, we hosted multiple art shows and community performances, held forums to partner artists with social-mission organizations, and launched the Starving Artist Venture. From 2010-2012, we began developing our Artist Residency programs. Our resident aerial & contemporary dance company, FALL, performed for over 8,000 people. David Landry began work on Th3 Anomaly, a fine arts graphic-novel in which each panel is a painting, which he completed in 2015.

In 2013, we began hosting our classes in Houston Station in a temporary 1700 sq ft facility, which became the abrasiveMedia Center for Artists; there we held classes, hosted our residency, and opened a visual art gallery space. In the spring of 2014 we moved to a 3000 sq ft facility, also in Houston Station. Over 13.000 people passed through this facility.

In 2016 our resident artists joined forces to present Dear Apocalypse, a meditation on PTSD through music, dance, and poetry at the Nashville Sideshow Fringe Fest. In 2017, abrasiveMedia partnered with Actors Bridge Ensemble and multiple independent artists to present Haunted, a Southern Gothic, site-responsive collaboration echoing voices buried in Nashville's nearly-forgotten history.

In 2018, we paid each exhibiting artist a showing fee, allowing us to show work from artists with social impact who may have limited commercial appeal. We also began prep work for our next strategic plan and held a full-scale audit of our existing policies & procedures.

We held auditions and began working on Project Awake with our inaugural cast in 2019. In 2020, we debuted a draft of the show to over 600 students at Nashville School of the Arts. We are currently reviewing their feedback which will be used to refine the show.

Because of Covid, Project Awake went on pause for two years. The program will run through the end of the 2022-2023 school year before a program review will be performed. We'll examine the program's impact (number of people served and known direct results from student & educator feedback), impact on the cast and crew (their takeaways from the experience), profit & loss, and level of demand for another touring season. After the review, we will announce the start of the next touring season and the locations we'll expand to include.

Impact

The past impact of abrasiveMedia has been vast.

abrasiveMedia by the numbers (since 2004):
350+ artists exhibited
1,187 average online weekly reach
7 organizations incubated
10 collaborative projects
32k+ audience members impacted
4242 conflicts resolved (approximately)
5 physical locations
60+ art shows presented
15+ theatrical presentations

And we've done all of this on an annual operating budget of under $89,000 per year, largely because of our residencies in Brick Factory (now Fort Houston) and Houston Station. As we began our strategic planning in 2019 we realized one very essential factor in our organization: we're all very tired. When we began our organization, we realized the importance of rest. We talked about the idea of holding space for reflection, recharging, and quiet every seven years. However, we didn't hold ourselves accountable to this until now.

In 2019, we closed our location in Houston Station, graduated the aerial class program from our incubation, and simplified everything. This will be shown in a significant reduction in activities this year (and thus our finances) as, during our rest years, all we do is maintain essential ongoing projects and prepare ourselves for what the future holds. Thus, we are ensuring the continued and steady development of Project Awake, refocusing everyone's time on their own personal artistic careers (as we are 100% artist-led), and facilitating our board as they complete the strategic plan. As we enter into our next fiscal year this summer, our staff will take the strategic plan and build an implementation plan. As we are an artists' organization, the primary factors involved in our decision-making will be first to determine where our inspiration is leading us and then to question where we are most needed in our community.

After closing nearly completely for Covid (our leadership is primarily composed of those who are immunocompromised or those who live with people who are), we are slowly returning from hiatus with the re-launching of Project Awake.

Needs

Operation Costs: Our programs are offered at low prices to our audiences in order to enable full participation from under-served populations. Our staff is currently part-time and volunteer. In order to provide the highest quality of service to our community, we need a full-time staff. Please contact us for more information and specific budget details.

CEO Statement

We've gone through several fairly major identity crises as an organization. From graduating several long-term resident projects, to losing our physical location, and now defining our organization in the middle of a pandemic while our entire team is composed of artists who are all either immunocompromised themselves or living with someone who is, we have become quite skilled at rolling with the punches. This process has been beautiful but also gut-wrenching. We have been overwhelmed by the work ahead of us, both collectively and individually.

However, we have slowly realized that we have a fantastic opportunity in front of us. While we have lost a great deal that made us who we are, we are now gifted with the chance to start again with refreshed vision and a clear focus on living out the ideals that we carry through our work. We had great ideas initially, but those were formed by very young individuals with more idealism than experience. Now, we know a great deal more about what the work costs. Not just financially, but also in terms of the costs to the people involved. I have personally spent a great deal more of my soul than I realized. I can't responsibly lead our organization to complete equity if the example I'm modeling is one of the constant cycles of exhaustion and burnout while regularly losing my grasp on the values that guide us.

We believe that for us to ensure that our work is excellent, we need to take the time to continue dismantling everything from the board to the programming models to how we go about getting funding, to time management, and how we take care of our people. And to do that, we need that to be our full-time focus until we are done. This may have an even greater impact on us financially in the short-term than the pandemic itself. Full-scale renovation is intense, and sometimes you can't live in the structure while you're rebuilding. But we believe that the finished work will be even more successful and life-giving for all involved.

We're not shutting down, and we're not gone. But we need to step back and understand more fully where we are going.

We are leaving up our previous profile information so that you might see our organization's history. However, we will not be fully updating these sections until we have a clearer picture of our final form. If you have any questions about this process, what's involved, and how you can help, please contact me at audra at abrasivemeda dot org.

Sincerely,

Audra Almond-Harvey

Board Chair Statement

abrasiveMedia has transitioned from a very small organization to one that is still small, but is rapidly growing. Over five years we have gone from a group of artists with semi-regular programming to an organization with weekly programming. Thus, our board must also grow and change, to ensure that we are able to govern during this always risky stage of organizational development. We have grown to a board of seven, and aim to be a board of nine by the end of FY2021. We have guided our Executive Director as she has audited all internal policies, implemented new systems to aid in communication among staff and volunteers, and improved our financial tracking and reporting. We are the proudest of our continued passion to govern this organization, and of the great impact that the programming of abrasiveMedia has had and will have on our community.

Service Categories
Primary Category:	Arts, Culture & Humanities  - Arts Education
Secondary Category:	Arts, Culture & Humanities  - Alliances & Advocacy
Tertiary Category:	Arts, Culture & Humanities  -

Areas Served

abrasiveMedia has specifically focused on offering support to artists and classes for the community in the urban areas of Nashville, with a particular focus on our neighborhood of Wedgewood/Houston. We are currently exploring other areas in which we may also make an impact.

TN - Davidson