Joe Nolan
“New & Used Glory” by Joe Nolan
Gentrification. Cultural homogenization. Broadening class gaps and a general deficit of empathy and nuance.
These are the topics the intermedia artist Joe Nolan wrestles with in much of his work, from poetry and photography to music and NFTs. Since 2015, Nolan has turned his lens and pen to the beautifully multicultural and also economically depressed working class sections of Nashville, Tenn., often delineated by major streets, or pikes — Nolensville Pike, Charlotte Pike, Gallatin Pike, Central Pike.
In the early 2010s, when Nashville was proclaimed an “It” city and a mass influx of new people and money began, a flood of developers, flippers and gentrifiers began to change the face of the very city they claimed to love. Along these working class streets, an influx of new, typically white, residents began to complain about or mock what they saw as the ugliness of these pikes — handmade signage, tire shops, bodegas, Ethiopian restaurants … you know, the things that make a city a city.
“In 2015, I did a photo essay of Gallatin Pike in East Nashville that we published to the WPLN website,” Nolan says. WPLN is the local public radio station. “It got so much interest that we immediately were like, ‘let's keep doing these.”
The photo essays evolved into radio segments with the help of WPLN’s Mack Linebaugh, and the Pikes Project was born.
Dedicated to documenting Nashville’s working class neighborhoods along its pikes, this project evolved quickly into a pretty democratic one. Joe spearheaded it with photo essays, poems and broadcasts, and then opened it to the public on Instagram.
“We started the Instagram handle @pikesproject, hashtag #pikesproject, and encouraged people to start using that whenever they were taking photography on the pikes,” Nolan says. “Now, when you go to Instagram and look up #pikesproject, there's more than 1,000 posts of people all over the city who've taken photographs and are continuing to take photographs.”
In 2020, after the Pikes Project had grown and held showings at galleries including Red Arrow and Sauvage, Nolan engaged with the pike communities in a new way.
“[I thought] what if we did something beautiful, and what if we did something beautiful with the people who live in that community who might otherwise not be a part of the conversation in the city,” He explains. “So, and this is creative placemaking 101, you go into the community, you empower people who don't have a creative outlet to have a creative outlet, and then you turn a space in that same community into a creative space that otherwise doesn't exist there.”
So Joe Nolan partnered with Metro Parks and middle school students at the Madison Community Center in a poetry workshop. Not only did the kids learn to write and celebrate poetry, Nolan facilitated the group creation of a four-line poem. It reads:
In windy nights, my spirit
animal is a lightning bug
spitting blinking bars in blue
violets beneath the peaceful world.
5th–8th graders wrote that.
Next, the poem appeared on a Gallatin Pike billboard near two prominent grocery stores. It went up in time for National Poetry Month… and for the beginning of COVID lockdown.
“That just turned out to be a perfect thing to do at the beginning of a pandemic,” Nolan laughs. “Where one of the only places anybody was going back then was to grocery stores and pharmacies. Here's this giant billboard right at this big busy intersection in Madison, and it just worked.”
The Pikes Project radio program, which incorporated this poetry, and now the billboard opened Joe up to a new way of thinking about presenting poetry.
“This is ambush poetry,” He says. “We're finding a way to take these tools that exist, and insist on a mass audience for this thing that gets forgotten … we had somehow accidentally made thousands of people trapped in their cars on a Monday morning [experience] poetry.”
“I'm used to going to the coffee shop, and the only people there are me and the other people who are reading their poetry,” he adds. “It seems sometimes that the only audience for poetry is people who write poetry … and not many people write it.”
This year, a new poetry billboard appeared again in National Poetry Month, which is every April. Nolan partnered with Dignidad Obrera, or Workers’ Dignity, an organization that fights for economic justice and the rights of Nashville’s workers — in particular, BIPOC and immigrant construction and housekeeping workers who often get stiffed on wages while working long hours in dangerous conditions.
“At this time here in Nashville, our construction workers are essential,” Nolan says. “Like, nobody's gonna stop building shit in Nashville. Even if there's a pandemic, these buildings are going to go up.”
Since 2010, Workers’ Dignity has recovered more than $1M in stolen wages.
“I wrote a story about them a long, long time ago and got to know the people who are running it, and I got to understand what they were up to, and I was just like, ‘this is the greatest organization of that kind that I've come across,” Nolan says.
A grant enabled Nolan and Workers’ Dignity to create a Zoom poetry workshop with representative workers from the organization and interpreters. Workers from the Dignidad Obrera community took part and created their own poetry. Again, the group also created a four-line poem representative of their experience. It reads:
Lluvia oscura en nuestras botas de noche, nuestra
Sangre marrón cubre la tierra en el calor del dia.
Cruzamos las fronteras del mundo para darte todo.
Que viva la dignidad del migrante.
The English translation is:
Dark rain on our night boots,
our brown blood covers the earth in the heat of the day.
We cross the borders of the world to give you everything.
Long live the dignity of the migrant.
photo by Brian Siskind
“I think it's hard enough for people who aren't necessarily self-proclaimed poets just to sit down and write some poetry for an hour. It just seems like it would be insanely hard to get 15 people to sit down and do this thing they never do, and somehow work together to come up with a short verse that will fit on a billboard, like that just seems like too big of an ask,” Nolans says. But the spirit and ethic of Workers’ Dignity isn’t one to balk at a challenge.
“They’re [Workers’ Dignity] always super creative,” he explains. “They're not dour, stern-faced, people. They bring a lot of positive energy to these protests that they do. And I think it pays off for them because, you know, it's basically a thing of like, ‘oh the hotel decided not to pay the housekeepers, for a month. Okay cool, you know you're going to have 50 people in your parking lot on Saturday morning, when the convention comes into town, and no one's gonna not see us. It's gonna be real obvious what we're there for.’ And boom, the next thing you know everybody gets paid. It's shocking that there's that much money that people are getting illegally screwed out of, and it's also shocking that they’re a group of determined folks who are won't take no for an answer in terms of their value of their labor.”
Nolan is also quick to point out that while the Pikes Project documents the quirky and roughshod sides of Nashville’s pikes, it’s not for the sake of artistic voyeurism or “ruin porn.”
“I’m from Detroit originally, and Detroit became the greatest ruin porn subject that we've probably ever had,” he groans.
Nolan’s photo “New and Used Glory” was recently part of Art Now America: A National Juried Art Exhibition curated by Mike Calway-Fagen.
“I think a lot of people nowadays, see these parts of the city, and actually understand the charm of them,” Nolan says. “A lot of is working class people with mom-and-pop businesses, and, you know, ‘I didn't have enough money for a sign, so my brother painted this stuff on the side of the building.’ And, ‘hey, we're just trying to make it work here in America,’ whether they were born here in Nashville or whether they came from somewhere else. That's the real vibe of the pikes to me — that chutzpah of these working class spaces, and people making a life for themselves.”
