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One week ago, a group of Nashville artists opened their show, “A Night in Tokyo,” at the South Nashville studio space Kreate Hub. Around a dozen Kreate Hub artists contributed their work, including several pieces with anime themes. Opening night also featured a replica of a Tokyo apartment, Japanese food and drink and old-school Nintendo games.
Kreate Hub opened in the former Gibson Guitars headquarters off Murfreesboro Pike in 2022. A branch of a company with locations in The Bronx and Philadelphia, the idea is a sort of coworking space, but with an emphasis on artists and creative entrepreneurs. Artists can rent shared studio spaces for as little as $350 per month, with larger rooms also available. The open gallery space is available for tenants to program.
Nashville artist Marcellus Hammond has a studio at Kreate Hub. He said the business model is “democratizing art,” as it allows local creators to circumvent the more prescriptive and insular Nashville gallery and exhibition scene. Though Hammond described the local visual arts community as “pretty welcoming” and “not as cutthroat” as in bigger cities, it’s still sometimes about “who you know.” For artists newer to town, like Hammond and Kyle Carter, another Kreate Hub tenant, that proves to be an impediment to getting their work out into the world. They’re building their own scene at the former corporate office building.
“To have that camaraderie and people around you encouraging you, and then getting inspired by one another is huge,” Hammond said. “Just for the community at large, when you get all these creative people, these artists together, all these great minds working together, great things are going to happen.”
Added Carter: “We’re all kind of like-minded. We all want our stuff shown. It’s more homegrown. … You start meeting different people and start sharing ideas and visions. People start like your art; you start liking theirs. This happens organically.”
Both have day jobs, Hammond as a valet at a downtown hotel and Carter as a middle school art teacher. And both mostly worked in isolation, either at home or at a solo studio, before joining Kreate Hub.
Carter was raised in the Nashville area and returned to Smyrna a few years ago after stops in California and Georgia. He describes his art as pop art, cartoonish, with ’90s and 2000s nostalgia themes. He is mainly self-taught, though he took a few art classes at Middle Tennessee State University. This is his first year teaching art to middle schoolers.
“I’m an artist through and through, so getting the kids to create and work with their hands, that’s what I love,” he said.
Hammond’s work is mixed-media, deploying paint and textiles to produce layered pieces. Though he is a relatively recent Nashville transplant, he has gotten busy networking both around town and at Kreate Hub. His art has been displayed at the downtown hotel where he parks cars, and he recently completed a mural at a downtown residential tower owned by his own landlord.
“The one thing that I’m grateful for here in this space that I didn’t have then is the creative community,” Hammond said. “I had the space, but it was almost like I was in a silo by myself because of where I was at. There wasn’t as many creative people, and they definitely weren’t in community like it is here.”
That is a goal of the Kreate Hub model.
Agnes Nicholson moved to Nashville to open and manage the facility for Kreate Hub’s owners. She organizes tenant happy hours and other events for more than 100 users of the facility. The Nashville venue has taken on a slightly different look from the original model, as barbers, small clothing companies, print shops, tattoo artists and a candle maker have joined the painters and muralists.
The founders’ dream “was always to provide affordable and high-quality spaces for artists, because many times artists are just being pushed to the side, or they’re getting a basement with no AC,” Nicholson said.
The model also relies on the purchasing of a building, so the business faces less economic pressure as the neighborhood around it changes.
“Visual art has such an important role in every community,” Hammond said. “Art brings us together. It also opens up space to have tough conversations and celebrate the everyday life. I feel like there’s more of a need for it now than ever. What happens oftentimes is these skylines rise, but a lot of the time the culture in the neighborhoods don’t rise with it. As an artist, it’s part of your responsibility to preserve the culture and the soul of the city.”
This article first appeared on Nashville Banner and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
This story is part of the Nashville Banner’s ZIP Code Project. The yearlong community engagement effort assigns Banner staffers to various ZIP codes across the city, where they spend significant time listening to residents and elevating stories directly from the community.
Marcellus Hammond is an artist with a studio at Kreate Hub. (Martin B. Cherry / Nashville Banner)