Coming to RADAR 615
From Zoom Calls to Gallery Walls- A Retrospective Preview
In October 2020, at the height of a pandemic that had radically changed how artists, teachers, students, and communities gathered, The Educators’ Cooperative, a mutual aid network for K–12 teachers in Nashville, opened a Zoom room.
The idea was simple: once a month during the K–12 school year, bring Black artists and creators into conversation with educators. Give teachers an opportunity to meet artists, hear about their practices, ask questions, and spend an hour thinking together.
What happened over the next five years was anything but simple.
From October 2020 through May 2025, Culture Corner became a monthly gathering place for 44 artists and creators (come see all their work in October) and the teachers who were eager to learn from them. Painters, sculptors, photographers, designers, musicians, writers, podcasters, dancers, fashion designers, educators, and social practice artists entered those Zoom windows and offered something that could not be measured by a curriculum standard or professional development credit: themselves.
Artists and educators laughed, questioned, listened, shared work, and wrestled with questions about art, race, education, culture, and community. Looking back, those Culture Corner calls were one of the clearest examples of mutual aid I have witnessed.
Now, five years after those first conversations began, A Lesson I Learned: A Lesson I Taught brings Culture Corner out of the Zoom window and into the gallery. Opening October 3 at RADAR 615, the exhibition gathers more than 40 of the artists and creators who participated in the series for a group exhibition that is part retrospective, part reunion, and part reset. It asks each artist to consider a deceptively simple proposition: What is a lesson you learned, and what is a lesson you taught? The answers are anything but simple.
Sam Dunson, whose Culture Corner conversation with educators took place in March 2022, contributes Actions Affirmed, three self-portraits representing different stages of his life. Dunson describes the work as “…an exploration of speaking oneself into a positive existence—of positioning the future self so that it can reach backward and guide an earlier self forward.”
Dr. Dori Tunstall, whose December 2024 conversation brought her into the Culture Corner community, contributes Growing Into One’s Own, a pastel chalk and black marker work on paper. Her lesson “…comes through the memory of my PhD advisor and intellectual godfather, the late anthropologist Dr. Renato Rosaldo, who taught me that education should give students permission to become their most authentic selves—as thinkers and makers, without causing irreversible harm to others.”
“For me, education is not about creating mirrors of ourselves or treating students as empty vessels waiting to be filled. It is about helping people discover their own thoughts, hearts, hands, voices, and cultural identities.”
Rae Yo Young approaches the theme from another direction with Hermits Home. Their lesson learned is that “being misunderstood does not necessarily mean failing to communicate.” “Instead of continually simplifying my work in order to be understood, I have learned to become fluent in my own language.” Young’s lesson taught is a permission slip: “curiosity does not require permission.”
Mikayla Washington’s Untitled offers another kind of lesson. Washington writes, “As a non-representational artist whose practice is deeply invested in color, brushstroke, line, form, and composition, I use abstraction to explore food, health, healing, and the complicated relationship between physical and mental wellbeing.”
“The lesson here is intimate and embodied. Healing can begin with paying attention.”
Dashawn Lewis, who along with Omari Booker gave our first ever in-person program, says of Untitled AJ: “While we are guiding, are we open to guidance? The youth have a natural way of teaching us things about ourselves and society if we pay attention.”“As much as I give instruction, I also have to be an active listener.”
And Stephanie Pruitt Gaines owner of The Creativity Bar, who gathered with teachers in November 2024, says of As Intended: “I’ve learned that I’m most often negotiating an idea, and the medium is whatever lets that idea breathe.”
“What I trust most is not the outcome but my ability to move through uncertainty towards an emerging something that I have the power to shape. That’s creative wellness.”
Taken together, these works demonstrate why Culture Corner artists could never be reduced to a single aesthetic, genre, discipline, or identity. Culture Corner began with a deliberate focus on the brilliance of Black artists and creators. That focus remains essential. But five years of conversations revealed something else: these artists are connected not simply by identity, but by their willingness to teach. They taught through paintings, performances, books, podcasts, fashion, photography, sculpture, design, music, movement, technology, and lived experience. And they taught by being willing to say, This is what I’ve learned. What do you think?
That spirit is at the heart of A Lesson I Learned: A Lesson I Taught.
Curating this exhibition feels like a natural extension of my art and teaching practices. As a cohort 3 member of EDCO and director of the Nina Lovelace Center for Arts & Social Practice at Tennessee State University, I am working with Art & Design students in our inaugural Non-Profit Arts course to collaborate with the artists on programming, artist conversations, public engagement, and other aspects of the exhibition.
Rather than simply presenting students with an exhibition to visit, we are asking them to participate in the relational work that makes an arts organization function: communicating with artists, thinking about audiences, developing programs, considering accessibility, creating connections, and figuring out how an exhibition can become a place where people actually encounter one another.
The result is a kind of intergenerational relay. The artists taught the teachers. The teachers brought those experiences into their classrooms. Now students are learning from the artists while helping create opportunities for teachers and the broader Nashville community to encounter the work. And the circle keeps moving.
Culture Corner will begin its next chapter—not as a return to Zoom, but as an in-person resource connecting teachers across sectors, disciplines, and grade bands with artists throughout Nashville.
The exhibition will include opportunities for Educators’ Cooperative teachers to engage with the work during an EDCO Coffee Meet-Up on the morning of the opening. Lead Public Schools Visual and Performing Arts teachers will participate in professional development facilitated by photographer, filmmaker, and social practice artist Darrel “Duck” Green. Metro Nashville Public Schools visual art teachers will have their own professional development opportunity, coordinated by TSU Art & Design students from the Non-Profit Arts course and shaped around artists from the exhibition.
In this sense, the gallery becomes more than a traditional gallery space. It becomes a classroom without desks, a meeting place, a studio, a professional development space, and a conversation. There is also a practical reason to celebrate this particular gathering. On Thursday, October 22, from 6–8:30 p.m., RADAR 615 will host the Educators’ Cooperative’s first-ever fundraising event, with proceeds supporting EDCO teachers and the programs they bring to students throughout Nashville’s public, private, and charter schools.
The exhibition itself is an extraordinary act of generosity. Artists are lending work without a guarantee of financial compensation. The point is to recognize the ecosystem that makes this kind of exchange possible: artists, teachers, students, curators, arts organizations, universities, families, and people who believe education does not only happen in a classroom.
Five years ago, Culture Corner was born because people needed a way to connect.
Now, A Lesson I Learned: A Lesson I Taught asks what happens when those connections are given physical space.
The real retrospective may not be the collection of artworks on the walls. It may be the network of relationships behind them: the teacher who logged onto Zoom after a long school day; the artist who stayed on the call a little longer; the student who eventually encountered that artist’s work; the idea that traveled from one person to another; the classroom that changed because of a conversation. And perhaps, standing in the gallery, you will find yourself asking the same questions the exhibition asks of its artists.
A Lesson I Learned: A Lesson I Taught opens October 3 at RADAR 615 in Nashville and continues the Culture Corner project by moving its conversations from screens into shared physical space. It is a celebration of 44 artists and creators, five years of relationship-building, and the teachers and students who continue to carry those lessons forward.
Huge thanks to ALL artists who supported EDCO teachers and to Lain York of RADAR 615 for his enthusiastic embrace of this exhibit from the first time we spoke about it, and Omari Booker, our first-ever artist conversation in October 2020, who helped me and EDCO shape the way in which we could begin and sustain these kinds of conversations while honoring Black brilliance and creativity in our city and beyond.
Amy Nystrand is the Executive Director of EDCO and was present for ALL of these conversations. Without her support this exhibit is simply not possible.
CULTURE CORNER-zoom talk series was once a month during k-12 school year for 5 years and specifically focused on the brilliance of black artists
2020-2021
Omari Booker, Donna Woodley, Lakesha Moore, James Wells, David Jon Walker, Douhjoe, Aaron Worley, Elisheba Israel-Mrozik
2021-2022
Jerry Pentecost, Chandonae Baskin, Rae Young, Brittany Boyd Bullock, Heriberto Palacio III, Marcus Whitney, Joi Ware, Sam Dunson, Mikayla Washington, Dashawn Lewis &Omari Booker in person (Art of the South)
2022-2023
Tasneem Tewogbola/Aundrea Blackman, Kimberly Dummons, Tanjarae Porter, Stephanie Pruitt-Gaines, David Jon Walker, Mike Mucker aka Ol’ Skool Mike, Kaleena Sales, LeXander Bryant, Hamilton Glass * Dashawn Lewis and Omari Booker were our first in-person programming as part of a special talk about their work as part of Number Inc Art of the South Exhibit at Zeitgeist gallery(now Radar615) in October 2022
2023-2024
Carl E. Moore, Anna Smith, Lesa Dowdy, Carlos Partee, Erihii Eric Nyamor, Ebone C. Amos, Nicole Humphrey, Dr. Megan Jordan, Troy Duff
2024-2025
Low Key aka Dr. Charles Key, Xpayne, Kevin Wurm, Jernicya Onykwelu, Dr. Dori Tunstall, Lorenzo Swinton, Elise Kendrick, Sean Clark
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
mikewindy=Mikey Mitchell
Arts and Social Practice professor at Tennessee State University, an HBCU in Nashville, TN.
I am a social practice artist with a painter’s eye and a sculptor’s hand, blending folk and conceptual traditions. My work uses color and humor as resistance to the negative ramifications of living in an increasingly complicated world. My signature, mikewindy, is a love note to my wife Windy, my first name and hers, lowercase and conjoined.
