about us

abrasiveMedia Specializes in Collaborations

abrasiveMedia is located in the Historic Wedgewood/Houston neighborhood in Nashville, TN. We provide a home for artists, a space for community classes and workshops, and a venue for bringing people of all ages and backgrounds together - all to fulfill our non-profit mission of helping artist grow, connect, produce, and give back to the community. We specialize in collaborations, and soon we'll be releasing some community tools to help you collaborate successfully and healthily.

On any given day you may find our space filled with dancers, painters, writers, aerialists, actors, martial artists, photographers, poets, sculptors, or musicians. You may experience a gallery exhibit, dance performance, circus act, theatrical production, mixer, art classes, concert, fashion show, conferences, or any collaborative mixture of the these. There's something for everyone at abrasiveMedia, and we hope you'll join us.

abrasiveMedia was founded in 2004

Our goal was to unite artists from multiple disciplines, enable them to share resources and audiences, and host inter-disciplinary art shows at a variety of locations in Nashville. We held forums to partner artists with non-profit organizations, and launched a regular social event called SAV (Starving Artist Venture) to promote networking within Nashville’s segregated artistic community. The early years of abrasiveMedia were event-driven, which helped us realize the need for permanent space, reusable resources, and support infrastructure for developing non-established artists.

We developed and launched the abrasiveMedia Artist Residency Program. Our first resident artist was Rebekah Hampton Barger with FALL, a contemporary dance & aerial company. During the first year, FALL performed for over 1500 people at Nashville Sideshow Fringe Festival, Edgehill Artisan Fair, private corporate events, and abrasiveMedia art showcases. Our second resident artist, David Landry, began work on Th3 Anomaly, the world’s first gallery-sized graphic-novel. We also began hosting weekly community art classes in partnership with The Brick Factory (now Fort Houston) in Nashville’s historic Cummins Station.

We moved our community classes to Houston Station, a 134-year-old warehouse in a largely abandoned industrial area of Nashville. The owners of Houston Station connected with our mission and offered abrasiveMedia a residency in their building while they began a huge renovation project on the facility. As the first tenants of Houston Station, we occupied a temporary 1500 sq ft space in the building where we planted our community classes, expanded the artists residency program, hosted workshops and special events, and opened a gallery space.

We moved into our long-term 3000 sq ft studio in Houston Station—doubling our space and growing our existing programming. We partnered with other galleries in the neighborhood for a monthly art crawl (Arts & Music at Wedgewood/Houston). More than 4000 people visited our facility during the 2014 art crawls. abrasiveMedia at Houston Station became a destination location, drawing additional tenants to the building and the surrounding area. We also launched our Outreach department with our first youth project, Super Squad, which worked with over 100 kids in Nashville’s urban communities teaching them art, storytelling, and design through the lens of making their own superhero origin story.

The development phase of Th3 Anomaly by David Landry was completed, a 4.5 year process which resulted in 321 paintings depicting a fictional story based on Nicola Tesla’s adventures through time and space. This project represented over 20,000 hours of work by everyone involved. We opened the Creative Café at abrasiveMedia, offering drop-in studio time for visual and literary artists (with free coffee & tea). We also partnered with Nashville's premier contemporary dance company, New Dialect, to offer affordable community dance classes in our studio every weekday morning. Celene Thaxton joined our artist residency program to incubate Chatterbird, an experimental chamber ensemble. Between art crawls, community classes, and other programming, more than 6000 people visited abrasiveMedia in 2015.

We debuted the world’s first gallery sized graphic novel, Th3 Anomaly. The show ran for an entire month and had nearly 2,000 visitors. We produced our first full scale theatrical production, Dear Apocalypse, which blended aerial fabric, contemporary dance, live music, and poetic narrative to tell a story about loss and hope when our personal worlds fall apart. Thanks to a grant we made this program available for free to military personnel and PTSD survivors at the Nashville Sideshow Fringe Festival. We also expanded our artist residency program, increased our community class offerings, and continued pioneering the best collaborative arts events in Nashville. We finished the year by partnering with 12th & Broad Magazine to host the sold-out “Gothic Circus” variety show. More than 10,000 people visited abrasiveMedia during this year.

We launched the Mixer, a podcast telling stories from many multiracial perspectives, at the Nashville Sideshow Fringe Festival. We also partnered with The Vanguard Nashville, a group formed by doctors, dentists, and business professionals from Meharry Medical and Tennessee State University to help promote art and culture in Nashville’s African-American community. We hosted monthly Vanguard events for the entire year until their regular attendance had outgrown our venue’s capacity! Adding Vanguard’s audience to our ongoing monthly art crawl, community classes, creative café, and other events, we engaged more than 17,000 Nashville residents through our programming and partnerships.

We graduated Rebekah Hampton Barger and her project, FALL, from our artist residency program. We fostered the company from conception to its own independent 501(c)(3) organization. We also began development of our next full-scale theatrical production, Project Awake. Project Awake was chosen for a development grant by the WDS Foundation and the program’s director, Justin Harvey, shared the project with a 2000-member audience at the 2018 World Domination Summit in Portland, OR. Having outgrown our space in Houston Station, we began the important process of growing our board of directors and preparing for the strategic planning that will direct our next stage of growth in 2019. At the end of 2018 abrasiveMedia has hosted 23 resident artists, shown over 200 visual artists and presented over 100 performance artists, facilitated 7 fiscally sponsored organization start-ups, 10 collaborative creations, 2000+ students in community classes, approximately 16,000 art crawl attendees, 23 part-time/volunteer staff… and an operations budget of just $89,000 in this fiscal year.

about us

abrasiveMedia Specializes in Collaborations

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