WE Fest Returns to the Edgehill Park Where William Edmondson Carved
October 22, 2026
October 22, 2026
On Saturday, October 24, the fifth William Edmondson Arts & Culture Festival takes over a park that should not exist by Metro's own 2018 plans. In May of that year the city announced it would sell the whole property at 14th Avenue South, park and garden included, to private developers. Neighbors gathered more than 3,000 petition signatures, and that summer Metro Council voted unanimously to stop the sale. The festival celebrates Edgehill's most famous artist. It also takes place on ground the neighborhood kept for itself and has looked after ever since.
The details for WE Fest 2026, as posted by the organizers:
The vendor setup has two tiers. Established artists bring their own tents to 10x10 spaces. The Emerging Artist marketplace gives newer sellers a table, chairs and room in a shared tent, even if they have little or no art fair experience. The festival bills itself as the only art fair in the country built around Edmondson's legacy. Its stated mission is to "educate and elevate his memory for new generations of artists."
No 2026 lineup has been posted yet, but past years show the range. A Nashville Scene account of an earlier festival mentions the Maplewood Drum Corps, family members of DeFord Bailey and Bobby Hebb, and Edmondson's "Lady With Two Pocketbooks." Austin Peay brought the sculpture to the festival while it was traveling back to Clarksville from a loan to ETSU. In 2024, NewsChannel 5 profiled wood sculptor Wilson Lee Junior and emerging artist Jazz Lucas, and reported that major funding came from the Tennessee Arts Commission and Metro Arts. That same year, Metro's October 2024 newsletter described an augmented-reality feature that projected a 3-D model of Edmondson's workshop onto the grounds. The newsletter credits a partnership between Vanderbilt University and the University of Maryland for making it possible.
The workshop model points to why this address matters.
William Edmondson was born in 1874 to formerly enslaved parents. He started sculpting around 1932, at age 57, as a self-taught limestone carver of tombstones and garden ornaments. Five years later, in 1937, he became the first African American artist to get a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His home, which was also his studio, stood at 1434 14th Avenue South, and he carved there until his death in 1951.
The house is gone now. A Tennessee historic marker shows where it stood inside the park. The land around that marker changed hands and purpose several times before it became a park.
| Year | What happened on this land |
|---|---|
| 1950s | Under urban renewal, the Nashville Housing Agency cleared homes on the park's southern end, Edmondson's included, and built Murrell Elementary School |
| 1968 | The agency took the remaining homes on the northern half by eminent domain and bulldozed them. After civic leaders including Mansfield Douglas, Jr. and Rev. Bill Barnes opposed the plans, the land sat as a barren field for about 30 years |
| 1990s | Organized Neighbors of Edgehill started the Edgehill Memorial Community Garden, one of Nashville's first recognized community gardens |
| 2001 | O.N.E. won a Community Development Block Grant from Metro to build the park's playground site, walking trails and picnic pavilions |
| 2018 | The city announced the sale. The Save The William Edmondson Homesite Coalition formed, and Metro Council voted unanimously to stop it |
In practice, almost everything a visitor will use on Saturday came from neighborhood organizing. The garden came first, then the grant-funded trails and pavilions, then the 2018 campaign that kept the land public.
The Friends of the Edmondson Homesite Park & Gardens describe the land as public greenspace kept up by their volunteer nonprofit. Since the 2018 vote, the group says, the neighborhood has paid for these improvements with locally raised money:
Ownership is less simple than the word "park" suggests. A 2024 Civic Design Center account reported that MNPD and MNPS share the land, and that Metro Parks neither operates nor funds it. The same account says a park ordinance names the Friends group as the nonprofit community representative. It also says Nashville Soccer Club and the Midtown Hills precinct supported a community soccer mini-pitch on the MNPD-controlled section.
That arrangement shapes the park's future. The Friends say the site "still suffers from lack of long-term vision and capital investment by Metro Nashville government." They keep pushing for a new Edgehill branch library, a William Edmondson Cultural Arts Center with galleries and performance space, and historic interpretation features. The group's future master plan also shows a plaza with an interpreted homesite, a new basketball court, seating and plantings. These remain proposals the Friends are advocating for. Separately, Metro Planning adopted the Edgehill Neighborhood Plan on August 22, 2024.
So the people running the booths and the Kids Zone on Saturday are, in effect, the same community that maintains the park the rest of the year. Contact details for sponsors and partners are on the festival's homepage, and the Friends post newsletter signups and volunteer openings on their history page.
The park marks where Edmondson worked, and his finished pieces are now held by major museums across the country. The closest place to see them on a regular day is Cheekwood. Its second-floor permanent collection includes a gallery devoted to 20th-century sculpture by Edmondson, with the carved limestone Girl with a Cape among the highlights.
That makes for an easy pairing on a fall weekend. Visit the marker on 14th Avenue South where the work was made, then go to Belle Meade and see the finished pieces behind glass. Next to Cheekwood's gallery, the patch of grass on 14th Avenue South shows how close this work came to losing its place of origin altogether.
WE Fest is the biggest date on Edgehill's fall calendar, but the small community events continue through December, mostly along Edgehill Avenue:
All of these are listed on the Edgehill UMC calendar. For weekday routines, Metro's Fall 2026 schedule for Easley Community Center at 1000 Edgehill Avenue lists adult open-gym basketball, after-school programming for ages 6 to 14, Kids Café and youth basketball practice.
The avenue itself is due for changes. Metro's Edgehill Avenue and Chestnut Street Complete Streets project will add protected bike lanes and slow traffic on a corridor that starts at Edgehill Avenue and 21st Avenue South. Construction on Edgehill is set to follow the Chestnut Street work, and no start date has been announced. The Edgehill plans already add pick-up and drop-off improvements next to the University School of Nashville, and a connected rebuild of Hillside Avenue from Olympic Street to Wedgewood Avenue adds protected bike lanes in both directions. For now, Saturday's festival traffic will use the streets as they are.
If you own a home near the homesite and want to know how its blocks, its history and its upcoming street changes affect your property's value, Beth Dodd works in Edgehill and can walk you through it. Request a free valuation and consultation, and stop by the festival on Saturday.
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