Daniel Phoenix Singh has much to say about a city’s ability to guarantee a thriving arts community. Better still, he’s got the experience to bring about those changes.

Singh’s commitment to equity was one of the driving reasons the Metro Nashville Arts Commission hired him as its new executive director last summer after a nationwide search. So far, he’s implemented new procedures, smoothed out some of the more cumbersome and made others just easier to understand.

Metropolitan arts departments advocate for the arts and arts education. They administer grant programs to local artists as well as arts and cultural organizations, and they oversee large public art initiatives such as the tribute to Nashville’s place in the Civil Rights Movement Witness Walls at Public Square Park and Alice Aycock’s Ghost Ballet for the East Bank Machineworks just across the Cumberland River from Lower Broadway.

This city’s department also partners with other agencies such as the Metro Arts’ Restorative Arts program partnership with the Nashville-Davidson County Juvenile Court and the Lending Art Library partnership with Nashville Public Library.

“We’ve simplified the application process,” Singh says. “And also we have removed some of the barriers. In the past, they had to have a one-to-one match, and that kept the small organizations and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) organizations out of applying because they could not find a match. Previously, applicants had to have been in operation for three years before they were eligible. That is now one.”

Coming to the arts accidentally

Singh was born in the village of Varangian in central India but grew up in the larger Chennai on India’s east coast. His family moved to the U.S. just after he finished his secondary education knowing they wanted him to attend college in the U.S.

He comes to his new job from a dance and choreography background; in 2003, he founded the Dakshina/Daniel Phoenix Singh Dance Company, which presents a fusion of Indian and contemporary dance.

Singh also worked at the Association of American Colleges and Universities for 20 years eventually becoming a founding staff member of their Campus Diversity Initiative.

He holds a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Maryland and another in business administration from Georgetown University.

Singh says he came across dance almost incidentally while in college. He’d been focused on computer science until late in his undergraduate studies, an academic lane his family happily championed.

“I took a dance class with a ballet teacher called Pamela Matthews,” Singh says. “She made it so fun and freeing and also connected it to my knowledge of physics … I also connected to poetry and literature at a younger age, both when watching Indian movies as well as when my French professor Eric Descotes-Genon taught. He would play opera arias during our dictation exams.”

Bringing public art back into the daily lives of its citizenry is the goal of any city’s arts organization, Singh believes.

“One of my mentors in India, Dr. Mallika Sarabhai, says that in the West, we have made the arts the cherry on the top of the cake, instead of having it be the yeast in the dough,” Singh says.

“So, yes to more public arts, because that is one of the few places where the arts are free and a part of our daily lives in communal spaces where folks gather naturally.”

The new director is fast opening up the process of finding out how to do that. He is asking the community what it wants from his department by including a public comment period at each Nashville Arts Commission meeting as well as the opportunity to do so online.

He regularly invites residents to join him for monthly tea and coffee chat sessions, and, more formally, his department held listening sessions during last fall and spring.

“We are in the midst of the cultural planning process that will also have a lot of opportunities for diverse communities to be a part of our direction as an agency for the next decade,” Singh says.

“We heard a lot about two things: equity and ideas for the future. Make the funding applications a lot more simplified and accessible. Remove barriers for participating in the funding process for emerging artists. Some community members love the idea of giving more funds to lower levels of organizations as they are starting off their trajectory in the arts ecosystems. A lot of these community and artist asks depend on the new mayor and new council helping us get to our 1% of the budget we’ve been advocating for.”

Metro Nashville Arts Commission vice chair Ellen Angelico says Singh brings a number of angles through which he can view arts issues in Music City.

Governments spend millions on “corporate welfare” to attract businesses while shortchanging the arts, the Metro Nashville Arts Commission executive director says.

-- Photo By Michelle Morrow |The Ledger

“He is an artist, someone who has run arts organizations and someone who has worked with government agencies, so those three things were pretty critical,” Angelico says, adding that it makes sense to further nurture what Nashville already has.

“It’s imperative that we build capacity in Nashville; that was the biggest thing. To use an example, we often do national calls for artists for public art projects,” Angelico adds. “We would love for some of those projects to be completed by local artists.”

Increasing city’s investment

Armed with data from the listening sessions and a disparity study that looked at the arts organizations of peer cities, Singh is asking the mayor and Metro Council for 1% of the city’s budget, a big ask.

“This is years of underinvestment,” Singh says. “Our brand is ‘Music City’ and ‘Athens of the South.’ Arts and culture are what has helped us grow, but our budget hasn’t kept pace with the growth of the city, so we have done a comparison study, and it said that of our peer cities, we have the lowest funding in different areas, per capita, and budget. We are asking the incoming mayor and council to look at this new data and right-size our funding by asking for 1% of the combined Metro and Metro Nashville Public Schools budget, which would be around $31 million.”

A study done by RISE Research & Evaluation, a San Diego-based research and evaluation firm, compared Nashville with the arts agencies of five cities: Cuyahoga Arts and Culture (Cleveland); Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture; Dallas Office of Arts and Culture; Austin Cultural Arts Division; and San Francisco Arts Commission. It concluded that the arts investment in Nashville “remains largely focused on the commercial music industry.”

The study points to the population growth from 2010-20, as well as the growing number of qualifying nonprofits and the rising operating costs in Nashville, as factors. Taken together, the study observes that the Metro Arts budget has not kept up, remaining not only stagnant but decreasing when considering inflation over the last 20 years.

“Given the dearth of Nashville-Davidson arts funding, we recommend a permanent increase in the amount of funding from the city’s general fund based on a percentage of the total budget, similar to the Parks & Recreation department,” the report states.

During the listening sessions Singh says he heard concerns about the lack of affordable housing for artists at all levels as well as needing a way to help creatives “sustain livability as the city changes.” Other requests were for more youth arts education, festivals and artist events.

Artists and arts organizations are constantly having to justify asking for funding while big businesses are often offered financial offsets, Singh says.

“No one talks about the obvious corporate welfare where billions of dollars in subsidies or tax relief are given out to large corporations like Amazon, Dell, Google to entice them or to keep them in cities,” Singh continues. “And these so-called profitable businesses have been bailed out multiple times by the government and taxpayers in the last few decades. Yet we don’t hear anyone asking us to justify why we need these businesses right? Why can’t we start from that approach to the arts as well?”

Arts as curriculum

One simple way to begin doing that, he believes, would be to begin to incorporate dance/arts at the school level.

“I do think we need to incorporate dance, physical movement and the arts into our lives much more intentionally,” he says. “It is a way of knowing, learning, communicating and being in the world. I know in my own life, being nurtured with dance at an early age would have given me 20 additional years of performance opportunities.”

In streamlining the process for applicants, Singh says the department has moved to a “trust-based” grant-making approach which he hopes will save staff time.

“We are working to bring more transparency to our processes at Metro Arts. We believe our applicants and assume we have to be their biggest cheerleader instead of putting up barriers to entry,” Singh says. “Another aspect we are working on is shifting power to the collective of individual artists and away from a few powerful individuals or organizations. Instead of pages and pages of final reports that tie up both the applicant and the staff, we are moving to simpler reporting that will allow staff to spend more time in the community building relationships.”

Singh says anyone interested in seeing if they qualify for funding can either call for an appointment or just come to the office.

“They can make an appointment, or they can walk in … The other thing we did last year is that we had grant clinics where we said ‘Come with your bio and your ideas and your portfolio and we will help you write the grant if you have never written a grant before, and if you feel like you’re not ready for it.’”

Ultimately, Singh believes that art should be anywhere people are, which has been lost over time.

“How do we let all Nashvillians tell their own history through their culturally specific music or the chosen medium of their artistic practice?” Singh asks.