Photo by João Silas on Unsplash

A Collective Approach to Building Knowledge

One of the most basic concepts in economics is that of a “public good” – a product or service that does not get “used up” as more and more people use it. Knowledge, by this definition, is pretty much the epitome of a public good – in fact, the more people that use it, the more valuable it arguably becomes.

Sadly, the incentives facing arts researchers push them to operate in silos, sacrificing the efficiency and potential that a more intentional, shared approach would bring. If you’re a researcher who wants to earn a living and you’re not in academia, you’re basically at the mercy of a fragmented market of funder and arts organization clients, most of whom have very parochial concerns and who rarely coordinate with one other on their research goals. In our experience, many of those in a position to commission research at these organizations have limited if any research training themselves, constricting their ability to exercise independent judgment on the best methods and designs for the job in the context of a rapidly evolving profession. Consultants and nonprofits who conduct such research seldom retain much control over the process and deliverable requirements of such efforts, making a centralized and consistent strategy for building knowledge quite difficult to execute. In addition, research contracted as work for hire often carries an implicit or explicit presumption of confidentiality, meaning that some of the most interesting work to understand the field is never made public at all.

College- and university-based researchers may have more autonomy over their portfolios, but face a separate challenge of visibility for their work. In all my years of following and participating in national arts conversations, I have never encountered a single arts funder or non-academic organization leader who makes a practice of reading arts-related research published in academic journals. (This is by no means an arts-specific phenomenon, by the way; a 2007 study estimated that half of all journal articles are only ever read by their authors, editors, and peer reviewers.) And if faculty members want to access funding beyond their internal department or university resources in order to take on larger-scale projects, they are subject to the same warped funding dynamics discussed above and in our previous recommendations piece.

All of these circumstances add up to an intense tragedy of the commons scenario in arts research. Even though research on neglected topics would provide benefits to a widely dispersed audience, it doesn’t happen because no single player is willing to take on the cost and risk of investing in it on their own. As a result, people pay a lot of good money for bad research, and don’t pay money for good research that could be happening instead.

This is not a problem that’s going to be solved overnight, but a clear step in the right direction would be for more convening, collaboration, and coordination between arts researchers, practitioners, and funding bodies. Createquity is not the first to call for such a change, but we see a different path forward than the one past efforts have tried to hew. Historically, the little convening that has taken place among arts researchers has tended toward light-touch facilitation, with no real goal (and thus, no outcome) other than to provide a space to share and learn from one another’s work. While better than nothing, this type of convening is ill suited toward the much more critical (and useful) task of developing a shared research agenda and coordinating a division of labor for the field.

During its life, Createquity offered a demonstration of how one might go about pursuing this latter goal, and we consider that to be one of our organization’s most valuable legacies as we prepare to sunset at the end of this year.

To Get Answers that Mean Something, Ask Questions that Matter

Since Createquity’s relaunch three years ago, the overarching research question driving all of our work has been this one: “what are the most important issues in the arts, and what can we do about them?”

In order to actually answer this, we needed to decide what “importance” means from the perspective of the arts ecosystem. We started off by defining what a healthy arts ecosystem actually looks like, and continued by drawing an equivalence between the cross-disciplinary, holistic concept of wellbeing (or quality of life) and ecosystem health. Doing so enabled us to connect the arts to broader conversations across the social sector about human progress, and create a framework that would make it possible to compare priority areas within the arts against each other. Thus, by 2016, we were describing a healthy arts ecosystem as one in which “the maximum possible collective wellbeing is generated through the arts.” [Note that the use of a term like “maximum possible” is aspirational in the sense that Createquity must make judgments in an environment of significant uncertainty. We aimed with our work to create a fuzzy but fundamentally accurate picture of (a) the world that is and (b) the world that could be with the benefit of different choices.]

With those definitions in hand, we were able to operationalize our tagline as follows:

• “What are the most important issues in the arts?” ➤ “What are the biggest gaps between current conditions and the maximum collective wellbeing that could be generated through the arts?”
• “What can we do about them?” ➤ “For any given gap, what is the most promising strategy or set of strategies available to close it, after taking cost and risk into account?”

Our research approach placed these questions in the context of a three-phase process, ultimately leading to an advocacy campaign for some kind of concrete change in the sector (what we called a “case for change”):

Phase I, the Discovery Phase, involved examining a wide range of potential problems or opportunities in the arts in order to determine which ones were most pressing from the standpoint of increasing overall quality of life. Each of these gaps between present-day reality and the world that could be was conceived as a separate research investigation. So, many of the big feature articles that you may have read on Createquity, such as Why Don’t They Come?, were the direct result of a Discovery Phase investigation – in that particular case, an exploration of the extent to which socioeconomic disadvantage was interfering with adults’ ability to experience arts and culture as consumers.

We identified potential investigations through two routes: our own intuitions and experiences, and external input. The latter involved assessing the results of our reader polls, as well as feedback from our advisory council members. By blending these two methods, we could have some assurance that we were investigating issues that our audience cared about, while at the same time not ignoring neglected topics that might not be receiving the attention they deserve.

Each of these investigations involved a thorough review of the evidence in order to estimate as precisely as possible how many people are affected by each issue, by how much, and in what ways. The plan was to then move the most consequential of these issues into the second phase, where we would consider strategies to close the gap between the status quo and the better future that may be possible. Finally, where we’d identified both a significant gap and at least one promising strategy to address it, we’d develop a case for change that translates all of the learning we have undergone into concrete recommendations and calls to action.

In 2014, Createquity buckled down and went to work on the Discovery Phase, hoping to complete our work with a flexible and nimble structure of quasi-volunteers. Unfortunately, this structure proved ill equipped for the significant expenditure of time and mental bandwidth that a systematic evidence review requires, and as a result we were only able to complete a small fraction of our overall Discovery Phase research agenda in the time we had. If funding had been available, we would have pursued the rest of the work using an innovative model called the Synthesis Project.

Borrowing from regranting arrangements often used by foundations and public granting agencies to reach smaller organizations, artists, and communities that they don’t have the capacity to reach directly, the Synthesis Project was a strategy to dramatically scale up Createquity’s Discovery Phase work over a two-year period. In this model, funding and management of research is funneled through one organization which in turn subcontracts individual projects out at market rates to teams of consultants. Instead of one to two research investigations a year, there might then be eight to ten. And instead of multiple agencies managing different timelines and approaches, there would be one centralized agency (in this case, Createquity) coordinating and overseeing all research projects.

The goal of fast-tracking myriad research projects is to build and share knowledge fast enough so that it can be acted upon. This means we aren’t continually stuck in Discovery mode, and instead can move into Strategy and Advocacy phases with a smart prioritization of the relative levels of urgency associated with a wide range of problems and opportunities facing the arts sector. At different key moments, the collective review and reflection on myriad investigations could be used to prioritize areas for further field-wide research and advocacy.

Although Createquity was ultimately unable to transition the Synthesis Project from concept to reality, we still think it’s a great idea, and welcome efforts by others to adapt it in the future. The industry is rich with research that can and should be mined for the gems that will help us to determine where the greatest opportunities lie to advocate for and build a healthier arts ecosystem, and what questions still remain to be answered in order to help us get further along the path toward a case for change.

Specific Gaps in the Literature that We Already Know About

Although we only got through a small portion of our research agenda in the end, it was still enough to identify some glaring gaps in the literature that it would behoove the field to fill as soon as possible:

Arts Participation
From a series of Createquity investigations, we know that many people get their primary cultural fix from things like listening to the music soundtracks of popular TV shows or attending their child’s band rehearsal – activities that do not involve the nonprofit sector at all. The big unanswered question hanging over that observation is this: would nonprofit arts organizations offer a better or more varied type of experience for the people who aren’t currently being reached by them? In other words, does watching a popular television program foster the same benefit to those audience members that attending a live stage play does? And if it does, what is the policy justification for subsidizing the cost of providing the latter, but not the former?

Arts Careers
Much of the evidence currently available on the topic of socioeconomic status and access to arts careers is indirect and based on incomplete data. The vast majority of research on artists’ livelihoods only examines artists’ current socioeconomic status, not their status at the time when they were deciding what career to pursue (and earlier). We thus don’t know much about, for example, the extent to which having rich parents or not affects people’s ability to contemplate pursuing an arts career at all. In addition, we don’t know how the level of intrinsic interest people have in pursuing arts careers might vary across socioeconomic background and other demographic categories, regardless of the reasons.

Cultural Equity
The question mentioned above – how does the level of exposure to and/or interest in arts careers and arts administration jobs differ across race and other demographics (e.g. income, education) – has significant implications for cultural equity advocacy as well. In addition, we don’t know as much as we should about the ingredients of a cultural experience that people find valuable, and whether those ingredients are consistent across demographics. Are the demographics of the staff (artistic, programming, and administrative) and board at arts and cultural organizations predictive of a) the demographics of their participants and b) the quality of experience that participants have? What effect does the scale of an arts organization (or an organization with arts programming) have on its ability to create specific benefits for artists, audiences, and communities of color? Finally, are arts activities designed to combat racism and other forms of oppression effective in that goal, and how do they compare to other anti-oppression strategies?

Benefits of the Arts
Research on the wellbeing effects of the arts could benefit from more longitudinal studies and more experimental and quasi-experimental designs, especially as regards the social and economic impacts of the arts. Even the very best work in this area (e.g., Mark Stern and Susan Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project) still traffics primarily in correlations rather than directly measuring causality. A good example of a study design that takes advantage of a natural experiment is Stephen Sheppard’s analysis of the economic impacts of the opening of MASS MoCA. More generally, it is likely that there is quite a bit of variation in wellbeing effects between disciplines, between different modes of artistic participation (e.g., passive, active, solitary, communal), and between categories of participants. Research syntheses and comparative studies looking specifically at these kinds of differences are generally few and far between.

Organizational Culture
In preparation for awarding of the inaugural Createquity Arts Research Prize, Createquity team members analyzed more than 500 arts research publications released in 2016; a similar process was underway for 2017 research before we made the decision to sunset the operation. An analysis of these publications confirms that very little publicly available research examines one of the most important open questions about the arts ecosystem: what motivates the decisions of donors, funders, and organizations supporting the arts. In particular, to what extent do wealthy individuals disproportionately shape ecosystem outcomes? And how can organizations and donors be incentivized to act in a more ecosystem-serving and wellbeing-maximizing way? We’ve seen a lot of theoretical literature and commentary on this, but very little empirical research, which is a major reason why the 2016 Createquity Arts Research Prize went to Mirae Kim for her work exploring these themes.

Other Observations

In the literature on the benefits of the arts, we very rarely see the impact of grantmakers analyzed as distinct from the impact of programs. When commissioned by grantmakers, such evaluations tend to imply that 100% of the credit for any success can be attributed to the grantmaker’s actions. Yet the truth is that some programs would have happened even without support from that particular grantmaker, and by choosing to spend money on that program the grantmaker is opting not to put that money somewhere else. We’d love to see more sophisticated approaches to determining the real impact of grantmaking decisions, not just the impact of the programs those decisions support.

There are a constellation of suboptimal funding practices in the realm of research and evaluation that deserve close scrutiny. For one thing, the field could benefit from more rationalization between the costs of research (broadly conceived) and the potential value of research. Funders rarely if ever seem to conduct explicit cost-benefit analysis when it comes to arts research. There is actually a methodology to do this that is not that hard to implement in its simplest form. We also strongly recommend against the practice of requiring grantees to demonstrate the impact of the grants they receive without offering to pay the full cost of generating that knowledge. Not only is such a posture unfair to the grantee, it sets up extremely warped incentives if the grantee’s continued funding is contingent upon a good evaluation and the grantee is also responsible for overseeing the evaluation. This would all be made much easier if funders were more willing to make use of existing research on the relevant category of intervention in their strategy design, and evaluate a representative sample of funded projects in the context of judging an overall portfolio rather than assuming an evaluation is needed for each and every investment.

Finally, it would be great to see more international collaboration on arts research. Some of the very best work these days is coming out of the UK, which seems to benefit from a far stronger knowledge infrastructure featuring the likes of NESTA, What Works Wellbeing, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been contacted in the past couple of years by Canadians eager to learn from their colleagues south of the border. And there are plenty of interesting arts research projects happening all over the world every day.

A Call for Leadership

The arts research field desperately needs a champion to provide leadership and make progress on the issues described above. Although the problems are serious, existing infrastructure like the Cultural Research Network could be leveraged to make progress on shared field goals, like developing a common research agenda, establishing and improving data standards, and co-funding valuable research projects that would be difficult to find a single champion for.

Who might be that champion? Almost anyone could step up to the plate, but in the United States, Grantmakers in the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts are probably the most obvious candidates. Alternatively, this could be a good role for a university entity like Vanderbilt’s Curb Center, SMU’s National Center for Arts Research, or Virginia Commonwealth University’s Arts Research Institute. We know that in Canada, an organization called Mass Culture is attempting to play this role, and additional policy and research efforts are underway at the Banff Centre.

Research can help us do our jobs better and make the world a more exciting, loving, and equitable place, but only if we give it the time and resources it needs. The infrastructure for building and spreading knowledge in the arts sector has long been under strain, if not entirely broken. But another world is indeed possible, and here we’ve tried to lay out the first steps toward making it a reality. The good people who work day in and day out to create experiences to cherish for a lifetime, and those who ultimately benefit from that programming, deserve nothing less.

Thanks to Rebecca Ratzkin for her contributions to this article.

Photo by Freddie Collins on Unsplash

This article summarizes lessons learned, as well as recommendations going forward for foundations, government agencies, individual philanthropists, and others providing resources to support the arts. A subsequently published piece contains further recommendations aimed at people who commission and/or conduct arts research.

For the past three years and change, Createquity’s mission has been to research “the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them.” During that time, in networking meetings with potential donors or friends of the organization, I would often get questions along the lines of, “so what are the most important issues in the arts?” Or people might ask for advice on where a donor should give if she were interested in making the most impact in the field. For a long time, I resisted answering these kinds of questions directly, because Createquity’s approach involved deeply investigating a wide range of potential issues before coming to firm conclusions about which ones might be most deserving of our attention, or what kinds of actions we might want to advocate for. Now, however, with Createquity having announced its intention to cease operations at the end of 2017, the time has come to share what we do know – even if there are still significant gaps in that knowledge – and what we think it means for those trying to improve people’s lives through the arts.

Please note: the analysis that follows is a hybrid of formal evidence review, informed opinion based on our collective firsthand experiences working in the field, and logical inference. While we have tried to make it as clear as possible throughout, we welcome questions about what is (and isn’t) backing up specific assertions, and will respond to them in the comments as they come in.

Consider Your Funding from an Ecosystem Perspective

From the very beginning, Createquity has advocated for an ecosystem-level view in arts funding. We’ve actually gone so far as to write out a detailed definition of what a healthy arts ecosystem looks like in practice.

Okay, that sounds nice, but what does it actually mean? Think about it like this. An ecosystem is kind of like a big theatrical production. There are a bunch of different roles to be played, and effective casting in those roles is crucial to giving the audience a good show. Right?

So, the huge difference between a theatrical production and the arts ecosystem is that there is no director making those casting decisions. A bunch of people just walk up to the stage, pick a part they want to play, and go to it. Some of those people might be better suited to playing a different role than the one they chose. In some cases there are two (or more) people duplicating the same part, and constantly stepping on each other’s toes. Another actor might play a role brilliantly, but disappear for the second half, or refuse to share the stage with anyone else. It’s all just a big uncoordinated mess.

Our only hope of bringing some order to this chaos is to recognize that, whenever we design strategy for a new program or redesign an old program, we’re casting ourselves in one of these roles. And it might seem obvious to say, but I’ll say it anyway since it’s so important: when designing the role we want to play, we must ask ourselves, who else is in the cast? What are the roles that aren’t currently being covered? And which of those roles am I or my organization best suited for?

I want to specifically call out that, in my experience, the highest-leverage decision points are often the ones least likely to receive this level of scrutiny. Sure, you may have set up a committee or commissioned an external consultant to decide how to refine and move forward on some specific program that you piloted last year. But how much due diligence went into deciding why your organization exists at all? Its geographic focus and target population? The originating logic behind its flagship initiatives?

People are fond of calling for more leadership in the arts sector. But the thing about an ecosystem is that it is fundamentally leaderless. Which means that we all have to be leaders if any leadership is going to happen. And to me, in the context of grantmaking, that means all of us taking the time to thoroughly understand the arts funding landscape before deciding what role is most appropriate for us to play.

A good rule of thumb is to start with the premise that every other funder is not doing this – in other words, that every other funder is less strategic than you. That flies in the face of the philosophy of humble servant leadership that we’re taught to model in philanthropy. Even so, I would argue that it is a useful working assumption, because if you believe it, then you must believe that it is your responsibility to be the actor in the ecosystem who fills the gaps, who does what needs to be done and what no one else is willing to do. It is up to you to find out what what is needed and neglected, and prioritize that over what might get the best press or the fanciest gala tickets.

And the reality is that my assertion above is likely to be more true than not for anybody reading this. The majority of philanthropic contributions to the arts comes from individual donors, most of whom have a very transactional relationship with specific charities they support and who are notoriously difficult to organize as a constituency. A landmark study of donor motivations commissioned by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation concluded that only 16% of individual major donors are motivated by impact, and only 4% consider the effectiveness of an organization the “key driver” of a gift; I would guess that these numbers are even lower for arts donors. Another fifth or so of arts philanthropy comes from corporations, many of which are motivated less by the mission outcomes achieved by grantees and sponsorship recipients than by the benefits those relationships can offer to the brand.

The overarching lesson to take from all of this is that it’s crucial to conceive of arts philanthropy broadly. Resist the temptation to overspecify the solution before you truly understand the problem. We see a lot of programs, especially at organizations that give out smaller-sized grants, that have tons of restrictions on what can be funded, for how long, how the money must be spent, etc. While there may be reasons (like internal capacity constraints) that justify these decisions from the perspective of the granting organization, at a system-wide level this practice results in intractable gaps in the funding landscape and strongly distorts incentives for prospective grantees. Wherever possible, we recommend pushing for the maximum level of flexibility that your donor or ultimate stakeholder is comfortable with – and if the donor/stakeholder is you, pushing yourself to be as clear as possible about the outcomes you’re interested in while being as open-minded as possible about the pathways to accomplishing them.

Regardless of the more specific advice below, this is the most important. Take the time to understand how your work fits into the overall landscape of needs and opportunities in the sector. An eager audience is depending on you to do it.

Don’t Put Your Name on That Fancy Building

Several years ago, the philosopher and ethicist Peter Singer made a splash in the arts community by writing a New York Times op-ed piece entitled “Good Charity, Bad Charity,” which compared the merits of donating to help construct a new museum wing and donating to an organization fighting a disease that can cause blindness in the developing world. Whipping together a back-of-the-envelope cost-benefit analysis, Singer wrote, “a donation to prevent trachoma offers at least 10 times the value of giving to the museum,” adding, “the answer is clear enough.”

Predictably, the arts blogosphere kind of freaked out, writing response after response defending or deflecting the practice of giving to the arts while characterizing Singer’s argument as “a shocker,” “absurd,” and “tyrannical.” It turns out that Singer’s piece was part of a broader outreach effort on behalf of a movement called effective altruism, which is devoted to the idea of figuring out how to do the most good with the money and resources available to you. Effective altruists believe that answering such questions involves hard tradeoffs, and necessitates a discipline called “cause prioritization” at the very highest strategic level. Not surprisingly, the arts often serve as a convenient example for effective altruists of the sort of “bad” philanthropy to be avoided in favor of higher-potential giving opportunities.

Our instincts may tell us to get upset about this, but the reality is that museum wings are easy targets for effective altruists for a reason. There is an argument to be made that capital investments in fancy buildings are the single worst category of arts philanthropy there is, and may be among the most wasteful uses of (non-fraudulent) philanthropy in general.

How so? First of all, capital projects are enormously expensive. According to “Set in Stone: Building America’s New Generation of Arts Facilities, 1994-2008,” the most comprehensive review of the data on capital construction in the arts that we know of, the average cost of a building constructed by or for a nonprofit arts organization around the turn of the millennium was at least $21 million in 2005 dollars (equivalent to $26 million in 2017). At the extremes, a single project can cost as much as hundreds of millions of dollars, more than the entire annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. Each year, arts organizations spend upwards of $1 billion on such campaigns, with most of that money coming from private philanthropy. Foundations devoted at least 10% and possibly as much as 38% of their arts budgets to capital projects in 2014, according to figures from the Foundation Center.

One major problem with capital projects sucking up so much donor interest is that they disproportionately benefit wealthy, established organizations presenting European art forms, often smack in the middle of places with very large populations of color. Moreover, artists rarely see a penny of this money; the most immediate beneficiaries of these expenditures are construction companies and their suppliers. Beyond equity concerns, however, capital projects frequently turn out to be bad investments even on their own terms: “Set in Stone” documents numerous cases of projects that failed to meet visitation benchmarks, exceeded expectations for ongoing maintenance costs, and/or ran over budget (by an average of 82% in the case of performing arts centers). The authors “found compelling evidence that the supply of cultural facilities exceeded demand during the years of the building boom … especially when coupled with the number of organizations [they] studied that experienced financial difficulties after completing a building project.”

This is not to say, of course, that every capital investment is a bad idea, or that arts organizations should never build new buildings. But given that buildings often come with ample opportunities to lure individual donors to the table (via naming rights, gala invitations, etc.), it’s even harder to defend institutional grantmakers’ investment in capital projects when there are so many more neglected priorities in the sector.

Where to Put That Money Instead

I’m admittedly biased on this one, but I believe strongly that our field has badly underinvested in knowledge. Annually, according to the Foundation Center figures cited above, just 2% of foundation arts grant dollars and 0.7% of grants go to research and evaluation. If my experience over the past decade is any guide, individual donors add virtually nothing to this total.

Even more concerning than the overall level of spending is the distribution of those resources. Existing research initiatives are heavily weighted toward primary data collection and analysis for specific, one-off projects, and most are limited in scope to a single geographic area, arts discipline, or both. As part of Createquity’s business planning process in 2016, we put together an exploratory graph of arts research initiatives, plotting them by breadth of geographic scope and where they sit on the spectrum between isolated data-gathering and more holistic efforts at building knowledge. You’ll see that, prior to its demise, Createquity stood virtually alone in the sector in focusing on the cumulative construction of knowledge through synthesis and interpretation of existing research – and yet even Createquity’s paltry annual operating budget for this work proved impossible to sustain.

This is a tremendously neglected area of arts funding, and that neglect has real consequences for how we all do our work. There is ample evidence that arts leaders are increasingly overloaded with information and need help making sense of it all. Because our field has not invested in the resources to make it possible to do so, it is likely that every day we are missing out on opportunities to shape the arts ecosystem for the better because we do not understand the evidence that’s already right in front of us. Indeed, the choices we are making may even be causing active harm.

As Createquity’s experience demonstrates, filling this gap and others related to our field’s knowledge infrastructure will require a new will to invest in field-building more generally. One of the persistent structural factors holding back such efforts is the difficulty of engaging individual donors in field-building conversations. Despite their importance to the arts ecosystem generally, in 15 years of working in this field I have yet to encounter a single effective strategy for organizing and communicating to individual donors about field leadership issues. Overall, individual donors represent a tremendous untapped opportunity to increase the arts field’s leadership capacity and overall potential for impact.

Moving on to more programmatic issues, there is a strong case to make that a worthy focus of arts philanthropy is advocacy to restore arts education cuts, especially for underprivileged youth at all age levels. Our judgment on this issue derives from several related observations. First, there is a lot of baseline evidence that arts education is beneficial for children, especially for those who have not yet entered formal schooling. Second, we know that in the United States, arts education cuts have disproportionately fallen on low-income families and black and Latino children. Finally, we have some glimmers of evidence that disadvantaged children benefit disproportionately from exposure to arts education. These factors, combined with the incredibly broad reach of arts education as compared with other types of arts interventions, suggest that evidence-based arts funders will find arts education of great interest. With that said, we should add the caveat that it is an arena already receiving a lot of attention, which may mean that much more work is necessary to create the political conditions for donor impact.

Speaking of evidence, Createquity’s review of the literature on the wellbeing benefits of the arts found that some of the strongest available research indicates that older adults and adults in clinical settings can benefit disproportionately from the arts. Participatory activities like singing, in particular, help to reduce anxiety and depression, improve subjective wellbeing, and even fend off the onset of dementia. And when it comes to attendance, according to the NEA’s research, nearly a quarter of adults aged 55 and older in persistent poor health were interested in going to an exhibit or performance in the past year but were not able to, which is a greater percentage than any other demographic examined in the report. This appears to be a highly neglected focus area; I am not aware of arts programs at any foundations in the United States with more than $1 billion in assets that have older adults or people in hospitals as the primary target audience.

Finally, on a more speculative note, it seems likely that the health of the arts ecosystem in the United States and beyond is more generally tied up with the health of the social safety net in those places. Many of the problems in the arts are reflections of larger issues that affect wide swaths of society. While the details of how they play out in the arts may be unique to the field, we can’t hope to solve them by focusing solely on our sector. When Createquity began developing a formal research agenda three years ago, I assured my colleagues on the editorial team that if our inquiry were to reveal that the most important issue in the arts is not an arts issue at all, they could count on me to make that case. Sure enough, after a decade of closely observing trends and shifts in arts policy, I’m more confident than ever that we are wasting our time if we are not taking society-wide issues like health care, wealth inequality, rapid technological progress, and structural racism into account when we develop arts and culture policy. We would do well to shift our working assumptions such that we believe an issue affecting the arts is not specific to the arts until proven otherwise, and therefore the solution to the issue is likely to live outside the arts as well. How can we work more effectively across issue-area and industry silos to make unified progress on these challenges that affect us all so deeply?

Suggestions for Individual Donors This Holiday Season

Createquity has always focused on the broad strokes of arts policy and philanthropy, and we’ve never positioned ourselves as a source of recommendations for individual charities to support. Still, every once in awhile I get requests to make those recommendations, particularly from people who don’t know the arts field very well and do not have strong existing commitments to specific organizations.

Although our recommendations are not as strongly rooted in evidence as those of, say, GiveWell, we do have a few ideas for donors whose primary area of concern is the United States:

• If you are interested in knowledge-building and field leadership issues in the arts, we recommend supporting Grantmakers in the Arts. GIA is the only entity deeply engaging grantmakers across disciplines, geographies, and sector boundaries, and is therefore best positioned to make strides organizing this constituency for greater impact. GIA has an existing knowledge-building function that we would like to see become significantly more robust. We’ve been pleased to see that the organization has begun engaging more foundation trustees in recent years, as well as more arts grantmakers outside the United States. In addition, it might be a good thing for the field if more individual donors, especially high-net-worth donors, were part of GIA’s revenue base and governing constituency.
• If you are interested in supporting arts education nationally, a donation to the Kennedy Center for the national Turnaround Arts program may not be a bad idea. An evaluation of Turnaround Arts from several years ago offered reasonably promising evidence for the effectiveness of its ambitious model (which uses arts integration as a holistic strategy to “turn around” failing schools), and the program has since expanded considerably. GIA and Americans for the Arts have national arts education advocacy initiatives, though we are not in a position to judge their effectiveness. Arts Education Partnership is a national arts education leadership organization that also has a research database called ArtsEdSearch.
• If you are interested in supporting arts opportunities for older adults or in clinical settings, several organizations in the US and UK have programs with solid evidence behind them, including TimeSlips, Elders Share the Arts, and Sing for Your Life’s Silver Song Clubs.
• If you are interested in supporting organizations in your local area, consider that smaller, grassroots arts organizations, particularly those rooted in communities of color, are more likely to be under-resourced relative to the benefit they are capable of providing. If you are not from the community that leads the organization you’re interested in supporting, however, do your homework first to confirm that your help is wanted before you offer it. Many local communities also have well-regarded arts education initiatives, such as Big Thought in Dallas and Ingenuity, Inc. in Chicago.
• Finally, while not a donation, we strongly suggest supporting ArtsJournal by purchasing a premium email subscription ($28/year) or classified advertising. ArtsJournal is a crucial news aggregation resource that has been the source of more than half the links offered in Createquity’s Twitter feed and monthly Newsroom articles over the past several years. Its content is generated from following hundreds of both mainstream and niche media publications and methodically curating the most relevant and thought-provoking content, six days a week, 52 weeks a year. Information resources like these are notoriously fragile in the digital era, and ArtsJournal is no exception: founder Doug McLennan has seemingly not taken a vacation from it in the ten years that Createquity has existed. Supporting ArtsJournal is a great option in particular for small-dollar donors who are not itemizing their deductions.

As much as we wish we could, we are unfortunately not in a position to make recommendations regarding charities outside of the United States at this time. We would love to see someone else take on that challenge, however!

Parting Thoughts

To be a philanthropist, whether the money is yours or simply has been entrusted to you, is a remarkable privilege in every sense of the word. The world is probably never going to see the day when literally everyone seeking to make the world a better place through the arts does so strategically and wholly without regard to self-interest. But the more we can nudge individuals, organizations, and actions in that direction, the more meaningful all of our work will become.

The magic of knowledge is that it is highly leveragable. What you have just read is a summary of a decade of inquiry into the inner workings and external context of the arts ecosystem. If the insights from that exercise ultimately guide even a mere handful of important decisions by well-placed individuals, it will all have been worth it in the end.

Until then, in this season of holiday generosity, and for many more on the horizon, we wish you happy giving and many happy (impact-adjusted) returns.

As longstanding concerns about cultural equity find voice in policy initiatives like these, administrators at organizations that celebrate European art forms, which are noticeably overrepresented among the biggest-budget nonprofit arts institutions in the United States, are snapping into action. Several years ago American Ballet Theatre, better known to some as the house of Misty, launched Project Plié, “a comprehensive initiative to increase racial and ethnic representation in ballet and to diversify America’s ballet companies.” Chamber Music America released a robust new statement of commitment to racial equity earlier this year. The 2016 League of American Orchestras conference was, for the first time, devoted entirely to the topic of diversity in the field. Hosted by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the choice to convene in a majority-black city and bring in Black Lives Matter activist DeRay Mckesson as a keynote speaker did not go unnoticed. Sessions focused on helping orchestras become more reflective of the country, including diversifying boards, audiences, and the players themselves.

In case you may be wondering about the reasons behind such a focus, consider that the proportion of African American and Latino musicians in U.S. orchestras is just 4%, a number that has barely budged since 2002. (The corresponding proportion of the United States population is almost 30%.) And it’s not just musicians. According to the same research, since 2006, the percentage of top executives of color in American orchestras has fluctuated between 5.2% and 1.6%, and the percentage of board members has consistently hovered under 8% people of color during the same period.

The consistency of these numbers over time is striking, given that there are more initiatives in place than ever before to diversify orchestras. The Sphinx Organization was founded in 1996 specifically to increase the percentage of black and Latino musicians in orchestras, and has since won prestigious awards and raised millions of dollars toward that mission. Forty years’ worth of foundation-funded fellowship programs for black and Latino musicians, with the number of such programs increasing dramatically in the past 15 years, have similarly failed to move the needle.

The issue goes far beyond orchestras. According to the most recent figures from the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, audiences for classical music, ballet, opera, plays, and musicals are all at least 78% white. Depending on the art form, that figure is a full twelve to seventeen percentage points above the national proportion of white people–a gap that has actually widened since 2002.

Things could still change, of course. Perhaps more time or a different approach is all that’s needed for these diversity initiatives to succeed. But at this point, it’s time to start asking the question hanging over all of this: what is the endgame? What happens if, despite the sincerest of intentions and tireless efforts to integrate, most organizations rooted in European forms of artistic expression never achieve anything close to proportionate representation of the demographics of their communities? What then?

In the wake of the protests following Freddie Gray’s death in April 2015, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra took to the streets to play free concerts in its communities. From the BSO facebook page.

White-ish Institutions

Createquity foresaw this tension in a piece published last year entitled “Making Sense of Cultural Equity.” The basic premise was that conversations about cultural equity (and any number of associated terms and topics) are informed by underlying visions of success that can be wildly divergent, but are rarely articulated explicitly. Based on our review of the literature and our own experiences in the field, we identified four archetypal models of cultural equity that together explain a surprisingly high proportion of the debates and dialogue that occur on the topic. The dilemma described above is at the center of a conflict between the Diversity vision of success (which wants to see fully integrated, large-budget “anchor” institutions providing benefit to entire communities) and the Redistribution vision (which holds that we should be shifting the balance of arts policy and philanthropic resources toward organizations and cultural traditions rooted in historically marginalized communities, including communities of color).

By any reasonable measure, “Making Sense of Cultural Equity” is one of the most successful pieces we’ve ever done. In addition to placing among our top ten most-viewed articles, we’ve been asked to present or write about it by organizations including Americans for the Arts, Grantmakers in the Arts, Independent Sector, Emerging Practitioners in Philanthropy, and Moore College of Art + Design. But despite the positive reception, I do think there’s one area where in retrospect we missed the mark. In the article, we stated that “[t]he one thing that everyone in the cultural equity conversation seems to agree on is that so-called ‘mainstream’ institutions–a community’s big-budget nonprofit symphonies, art museums, presenters, etc–are far too homogeneous.” That link above takes you to our notes page, where we elaborate on the definition of “mainstream”:

Language can be a source of great confusion in conversations about cultural equity, and many commonly-used terms are highly contested. In this article, we employ several key concepts that can benefit from further elaboration. Please consider the following definitions as you read:

Mainstream institutions: In the course of our reading, we came across the term “mainstream” institutions or organizations with some frequency. Although rarely defined explicitly, we infer that this term typically denotes nonprofit organizations that 1) were founded by white people; 2) do not have a focus on an art form or an audience connected with a specific community of color or other oppressed community; 3) receive funding from foundation and government sources; and 4) have some professional staff.

This language did not escape the sharp eyes of Justin Laing, at the time a senior program officer at the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh who had also been a key spark behind Grantmakers in the Arts’s racial equity initiative. On Twitter, Justin shared a number of comments on the article, including the following:

Middle & upper class white America is “a stream” not the “mainstream” of America. Referring to this group as “main” is 2 overrepresent. 5/9

— Justin Laing (@jdlaing) September 1, 2016

Just as referring to ALAANA arts orgs as “specific” is a marginalization or underrepresentation and perpetuates a #WesternCanon center (6/9)

— Justin Laing (@jdlaing) September 1, 2016

As it turns out, we did have extensive internal discussions about the problems with the term “mainstream” as we were preparing the piece, but we ended up using it anyway, largely because it seemed fairly well established in the literature and we were trying to be careful to use the language from our readings rather than invent our own. But Justin’s feedback, and subsequent conversations that I have had with him and others on these topics, have convinced me that we should do more to interrogate the way this term is used.

In the research literature, the term “mainstream” is often contrasted with the language “culturally-specific” (a term that we did avoid), and it is this combination that provokes the fiercest resistance from cultural equity advocates. The logic on researchers’ part is that “culturally-specific” organizations explicitly target a specific demographic population, whereas “mainstream” organizations target everyone. On its face, this seems perfectly reasonable. In practice, though, the dynamic is asymmetric. Organizations celebrating European art forms tend to have been founded earlier than organizations that primarily serve communities of color and benefited from the structural advantages enjoyed by white culture at the time (and since), enabling them to capture much of the sector’s wealth. And yet virtually none of these institutions identify as “culturally-specific,” despite what the statistics shared at the beginning of this article might suggest. Indeed, aficionados of these art forms often wax poetically about their universal appeal, pointing proudly to the way that classical music, for example, has become a national symbol of pride in Venezuela through the famous El Sistema program, the way that it has spread like wildfire in East Asia, and the extensive outreach and education initiatives many American orchestras have undertaken in low-income, black and brown communities. But many cultural equity advocates see orchestral music as unabashedly and irredeemably white: it originated in Europe, the vast majority of composers presented (even by Latin American and Asian orchestras) are European or European-descended, and most of the people who enjoy it are of European origin. To them, when we talk about culturally-specific organizations, that includes symphony orchestras–and ballets, and operas, and encyclopedic art museums. And it’s not at all obvious to them why certain culturally-specific organizations should continue to receive such a disproportionate share of public and philanthropic support compared to other culturally-specific organizations. In fact, they think it’s pretty obvious that the balance is out of whack.

Now, some readers might blanch at the application of so stark a label as “white” to organizations like orchestras, especially at a time when they are trying so hard to attract more diverse audiences and workforces. And truth be told, I share some of these reservations. While I’m generally skeptical of claims to universality, I struggle deeply with the way that essentializing art forms by race, and the organizations that practice those art forms, seemingly erases the people of color who do participate in and have fallen in love with European-derived traditions. According to the NEA’s figures, more than a million African Americans saw a classical music concert at some point in 2012; nearly 600,000 Latinos took in a ballet performance; and the list goes on. That’s a lot of people. Do opera singers of color agree that opera will always be a white art form? Whose place is it to judge whether someone’s choice of profession might be (as I have seen suggested by some) a manifestation of internalized racial inferiority?

I don’t know the answers to these questions, and can’t speak for people of color working in these traditions. That said, even if we stop short of labeling Shakespeare theaters and the like “white,” it seems obvious that they are, and will likely remain for some time, at the very least “white-ish.” In the end, we can’t force people to love Beethoven, Balanchine, Botticelli, Brecht, or anything else, no matter how much educating, exposing, coaxing, and pleading we do. And in today’s United States, it is increasingly art forms that did not originate in Europe that are getting the love: as of this year, the most popular genre of music to listen to is hip-hop. (From that link: “Classical music was in last place with just 1 percent of all music consumption in the year-to-date.”)

Difficult Choices

In “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” we defined mainstream institutions, in part, as “…founded by white people.” But it may be more helpful to consider mainstream institutions and Eurocentric institutions as two different things. Professional orchestras, ballet companies, and operas not only have a mandate to serve a broad audience, but must do so via a particular art form. Many other large-budget nonprofit organizations–performing arts centers, festivals, and some museums, to name a few–are not necessarily so constrained. It’s somewhat easier to imagine this latter group of institutions transforming in ways that authentically serve an entire community, service that would in fact justify disproportionate subsidy from a local arts agency or an impact-minded philanthropist. Separating our concepts of “mainstream” and “white” could allow us to treat European art forms as just one of many types of cultural expression within a mix of organizations and communities, instead of privileging them as the historical default. Just as importantly, that distinction would make it easier to justify allowing some organizations to continue maintaining a largely white identity when that is the most authentic expression of their mission. The problem arises only when such organizations seek and receive disproportionate philanthropic resources on the pretense of serving or speaking for an entire community that’s much more diverse than they are.

Were the field to adopt this new understanding, an unavoidable question would face every organization celebrating European cultural heritage in the midst of a substantial nonwhite population: is our foremost loyalty to our art form or our local community? In answering, boards and executives would need to realize that true commitment to the latter could mean dramatic changes, changes that would make their organizations unrecognizable to the individuals who founded them. Yet reaffirming a primary commitment to an art form with clear ethnic roots–which, I want to emphasize here, is an equally valid choice under this paradigm–would be a signal to the world that the organization’s diversity and inclusion efforts can only reach so far. And yes, that may make it untenable to go after large sums of money from foundations and government agencies on the premise of being a local “anchor institution.”

Unity in Diversity?

Ultimately, this discussion highlights the importance of clarifying what we really mean by cultural equity, and what we want for our communities and our sector. In “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” we noted the tension between integration and cultural ownership as one of the central fault lines separating the Diversity vision from other definitions of cultural equity:

Echoing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” the Diversity vision is in love with the idea of people coming together to understand and celebrate their differences. Yet for some activists, the expectation to share and share alike implied by this utopian, color-blind harmony ignores oppressed groups’ right to meaningful control of resources, traditions, and spaces that they can call their own. The Prosperity, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination visions all incorporate elements of ownership based on common heritage and identity, with no explicit obligation to be inclusive toward other cultures within those contexts.

If we adopt a cultural policy that stereotypes organizations practicing European art forms as hopelessly foreign to anyone who doesn’t share ethnic roots with their founders, we leave behind millions of people of color who want to engage with those art forms and make them a part of their lives. But if we are so committed to providing African Americans and Latinos with opportunities to participate in classical music that we write those expectations into law, does that imply a corresponding expectation that organizations practicing traditions like mariachi and Butoh will likewise reach beyond their immediate communities? As a society, how much do we want our cultural policy to emphasize affirming identity vs. broadening horizons?

Again, I don’t know where that balance should be. But I feel certain that we ignore the question at our peril. Every diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative that fails to grapple with the inherent tensions living within those words risks birthing strategies that sound wonderful on their own terms but work at cross purposes in combination. Until we rise to the challenge of understanding and articulating our goals at the system level, we’re going to keep running into the same issues, and having the same arguments, over and over again.

This piece was adapted and expanded from material originally cut from “Making Sense of Cultural Equity,” by Clara Inès Schuhmacher, Katie Ingersoll, Fari Nzinga, and Ian David Moss, as well as from a keynote speech I delivered to the Orchestras Canada conference in May 2017. I’m grateful to Clara, Katie, and Fari along with many others for helping to shape my thinking on this topic, and to Justin Laing for challenging me to dig deeper. Justin and I will be presenting a session exploring these issues in further depth at this year’s Grantmakers in the Arts conference.

For the past decade, Createquity has taken a technocratic approach to covering arts policy in the United States and beyond. We’re not mindless cheerleaders for arts funding; we recognize that governing requires making tradeoffs in the face of limited resources, and have argued against certain types of government arts support in the past. Nevertheless, we believe that the National Endowment for the Arts and other targeted federal agencies do valuable work and are worth saving.

Here are some perspectives on the current budget situation that you may find of use:

Are all these cuts actually going to happen?

Probably not, but that doesn’t mean the danger isn’t real. It appears that Trump’s budget was heavily influenced by staffers from the conservative Heritage Foundation, which has long targeted agencies including the NEA and CPB out of an ideological belief that the government shouldn’t be funding the arts and humanities at all. Nevertheless, the budget proposal is already running into opposition from Congressional Republicans, who are seeing it as unrealistic and poorly targeted. Furthermore, eliminating the NEA and NEH will require an actual act of Congress, not just a ratification of the president’s budget. All of that suggests it’s unlikely (though possible) that the agencies will disappear completely, at least in FY18.

That said, it seems virtually certain that we will see at least some cuts. Trump’s budget is so aggressive in so many areas that pushing back on all fronts simultaneously will be very difficult—indicative of a classic hardball negotiation technique.

How will regular people be affected if these agencies are actually eliminated?

It depends on where they live. The vast majority of foundations and individual donors concentrate their giving in the immediate geographic area around where they’re based, which means that the areas with the most wealth (largely big cities on the coasts) are also the ones that receive the most philanthropic funding. As a result, resources are few and far between for arts organizations and public radio and television stations alike in rural America.

In the NEA’s case, the agency has made a point to provide direct funding in every congressional district in the country. Perhaps even more important, though, is the NEA’s system of partnerships with state and regional arts councils, which come with a carrot of matching funds from the federal government in exchange for appropriations from state budgets to their respective state arts councils. In the years following the Great Recession when state budgets were under severe pressure, many of these state arts councils survived in no small part because of this matching fund arrangement. Meanwhile, an external assessment estimates that eliminating the Corporation for Public Broadcasting would mean 12 million people losing their access to over-the-air public television, mostly in isolated areas.

As for arts organizations, museums, and public broadcasters in other regions of the country, some will have a tough time to be sure, but the overall effect on the ecosystem would be subtle. The United States didn’t have the NEA, the NEH, CPB, or IMLS for the first 190 years or so of its existence. We believe these agencies create more value than we spend on them, but if they are eliminated, arts and culture will soldier on.

Speaking of creating value, I read that the NEA gets a return of $9 for every dollar invested. Is that true?

No, and we wish arts advocates and the agency itself would avoid using this misleading statistic. It falsely assumes that none of the matching funds leveraged by the NEA would otherwise be there for grantees if the federal funding went away. In reality, matching funds are fungible to a large degree, meaning that the non-federal money is often already committed and it’s really the government that is providing the match, not the other way around. (The big exception here is matching funds for low-budget state arts councils, as discussed above.) Framing it as a “return on investment” is even more misleading, as this implies an astronomical multiplier effect to the spending that simply has no basis in evidence.

Right. So why can’t the arts just fend for themselves on the free market?

They already do. The United States is an outlier among developed-world economies in that its arts funding system is highly decentralized and market-driven. Just 1.2% of arts organizations’ budgets comes from the federal government, so artists and arts organizations have no choice but to sink or swim in the private sector. And as noted above, for all conservatives’ trumpeting of the free market, private philanthropy isn’t very generous to the rural areas and red states that helped Trump get elected. In any case, getting rid of the NEA doesn’t get the government out of the business of funding the arts. In fact, the most significant federal arts funding sources are the Smithsonian ($840 million) and the Department of Defense ($437 million for military bands alone). Yep, that’s right: we spend three times as much on military bands as we do on the entire budget of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Not to mention, it’s a little rich to complain about nonprofit arts organizations drinking from the government trough when we give away billions of dollars in free money to for-profit industries including oil & gas, corn, and airlines.

Wait, so if the NEA is so insignificant, why bother fighting for it? Wouldn’t it be easier to just take the money and create a parallel private endowment with the same mission?

Yeah, that does sound nice, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, it probably wouldn’t work. Just to maintain current funding levels, which are well below the agency’s inflation-adjusted peak from 1992, one would have to raise an endowment of approximately $3 billion, which would rank up there with the nation’s largest private foundations. Interestingly, Kansas tried to do something like this several years ago—Governor Sam Brownback terminated the Kansas Arts Commission with the plan of setting up a new private entity, the Kansas Arts Foundation. The plan never got off the ground due to poor fundraising results, and the next year, the arts council was brought back to life under a new name.

The NEA’s budget is slight, but as a result it’s had to learn to accomplish a lot with a little (by federal government standards, anyway). The agency does important knowledge infrastructure work, most notably by organizing the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), conducted every five years in collaboration with Census Bureau. The SPPA provides us with widely-used statistics about arts participation that would be extremely hard to replicate with the same accuracy in the private sector, because the imprimatur of government is so important for reliable surveys. As a government agency, the NEA also possesses an important power to help set agendas in an otherwise leaderless ecosystem. The contemporary creative placemaking movement was almost entirely incubated at the NEA under the leadership of former Chairman Rocco Landesman, which looms as one of the Endowment’s biggest policy wins in recent history.

What about the argument that the arts and media are better off operating outside the influence of government?

We largely agree with this—it’s one reason why the United States is better equipped to withstand creeping authoritarianism than democracies with more centrally controlled institutions. But as noted above, America’s arts funding system is already far too weak to make political work risky for artists in the way that it is risky in some other countries. Thus, while protecting freedom of expression could be a valid argument against increasing the agencies’ budgets by too great an amount, it is not an argument for decreasing them.

What about other agencies? Is the impact on the arts limited to the Endowments, IMLS, and CPB?

Unfortunately, no. The Trump budget is very wide-ranging in its targets, and includes relevant cuts to the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, the Interior Department’s National Heritage Areas, funding for after-school and summer enrichment programs within the Department of Education, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which helps fund low-income artist housing initiatives.

Is it wise to put energy into defending the NEA and these other agencies when there’s so much else going on (climate change, threats to immigrants, international relations, etc.)?

That’s a tough call, but we believe the answer is yes. The Trump administration represents a unique challenge for America today, and picking battles seems to play into its strategy. Legislators make the budget, legislators for the most part want to keep their jobs, and they respond to pressure from their constituents. So you know what to do. #SavetheNEA.

Cover photo credit: Felix Russell-Saw

“Catalog” by Flickr user Beyond DC

The platitudes are on the lips of every arts supporter, ready to be recalled at the first sign of a public hearing or potential funding cut. “The arts are essential – a necessity, not a luxury.” “The arts help kids learn.” “The arts are the foundation of the knowledge economy.” It feels good to say those things, especially if you’re someone who has spent a life in the arts. But are they actually true? Are we pulling a fast one on ourselves and our audience by saying them? Or are we doing a service to the world by spreading the good news?

Over the past half century, hundreds of researchers have spent thousands of hours and millions of dollars grappling with these questions. And while the literature still has a ways to go before we can consider the answers definitive, it is becoming clear in at least several arenas that it’s not just our imagination: arts participation really does improve lives. In particular:

• Participatory arts activities help to maintain the health and quality of life of older adults. As discussed in our previous feature, singing improves mental health and subjective wellbeing; taking dance classes bolsters cognition and motor skills; dancing and playing a musical instrument reduce the risk of dementia; and visual arts generate increases in self-esteem, psychological health, and social engagement.

• Arts therapies contribute to positive clinical outcomes, such as reduction in anxiety, stress, and pain for patients. Music interventions tend to dominate studies in this area, mostly characterized by passive forms of participation (e.g., listening to music).

• Arts participation in early childhood promotes social and emotional development. For example, teachers report fewer instances of shy, aggressive, and anxious behavior among preschoolers taking dance classes, and toddlers receiving music instruction demonstrate increased social cooperation with other children.

• Student participation in structured arts activities enhances cognitive abilities and social skills that support learning, such as memory, problem-solving, and communication. (While arts participation may improve academic attainment as well, any effects are fairly small.)

We’ve catalogued these and other benefits in an interactive graphic we’ve created – the first of its kind – that explores the various benefits claimed for arts participation along with the strength of evidence backing those claims. See how the benefits stack up against each other at a glance, or zoom in to read what the research has to say about specific questions. (Read about our methodology here.) We recommend viewing in full-screen mode for best results.

Before we dive in further, a little context-setting is in order. The first thing to note is that what you’re going to read below is a work in progress. The literature on the effects of arts participation is vast and of highly uneven quality. To arrive at the conclusions we express here, we’ve relied heavily on existing literature reviews and meta-analyses on the topics in question, which means that any errors of interpretation or questionable judgments in those reviews are likely repeated here. Over time, we intend to get to know the underlying studies and publications and fill in gaps or make corrections as needed. In addition, new research on these topics comes out on a regular basis, and sometimes it challenges conclusions that we had previously drawn about a topic. For both of these reasons, you can expect that we will make tweaks both to the interactive and the content below as we gain access to new information going forward.

Second, it’s important to remember that the focus of this review is quite broad, and looks for general effects on a general population. It’s likely that in practice, there is quite a bit of variation between disciplines, between different modes of artistic participation, and between participants (e.g., different personality types). We can already say, for example, that music is both the most-studied intervention and the one that seems to have the most robust evidence behind it. As we get to know the literature better via the process described above, we’ll be able to identify these kinds of nuances with more precision.

Readers interested in the details behind the evidence in the article are encouraged to take a look at our capsule reviews on participatory arts for older adults, cultural arts and dementia, arts and early childhood, and arts and at-risk youth, all of which are based on in-depth literature and systematic reviews conducted by others and outline common methodological shortcomings and recommendations for future research. Of particular note is our capsule review on the Cultural Value Project (CVP), which shares the results of the UK-based Arts and Humanities Research Council’s three-year investigation into the value of culture. While the full bibliography to this article is far more extensive, our investigation relied heavily on the above sources.

Feelin’ Good: Physical and Mental Health

Of the four broad areas of arts impact that we identified in our review, the most robust research has taken place in the areas of education and personal development and physical and mental health. In fact, the evidence underlying the benefits of the arts for older adults is so compelling that we decided to write a whole separate article about it. A variety of participatory arts activities improve older adults’ mental and physical health, and in some cases, lessen the likelihood of developing dementia later in life. For instance, weekly singing has been shown to decrease anxiety and depression; weekly dance has been shown to improve cognition and attention, posture and balance, and hand and motor skills; and lifelong engagement with music, particularly playing an instrument, is correlated with improved memory among older adults. The arts also play a role in improving the overall quality of life for older adults more generally, such as attitudes toward social life.

While this was some of the most compelling evidence uncovered by our review, older adults aren’t the only beneficiaries. Arts therapies have been shown to improve clinical outcomes among patients. For example, a 2004 review of more than 400 pieces of literature exploring the arts’ and humanities’ relationship to healthcare and the arts’ effects on health identified a number of impacts for arts therapies. This includes visual art and music helping to reduce anxiety and depression among cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, an association between music and reduction in anxiety and blood pressure in cardiovascular care, and reduction in use of pain medicine following surgery. Music tends to dominate these studies, with a generally positive effect on anxiety, stress, and pain reduction among patients. Another strain of studies has explored the related claim that visual art and design may help to improve the quality of healthcare settings, thus improving patient satisfaction and clinical outcomes. While the methodological quality of the evidence in this area is considerably weaker than that described above, initial results support the claim..

The arts may also generate health impacts beyond dedicated healthcare settings. We found that community arts activities probably contribute to healthy living habits and improved understanding of health. Using a mixed-methods approach that included a community-randomized design, an evaluation of 100 small participatory arts projects across impoverished parts of London found increases among participants in healthy eating, physical activity, and positive feelings. Similarly, a 2003 mixed-methods evaluation of the Wrekenton Lanterns Project, a community arts project drawing attention to coronary heart disease, suggested that arts activities contributed to healthy personal development, including healthy eating and mothering, mental health improvements, and increased absorption of health information. In the absence of longitudinal studies, however, it is difficult to know if participants sustained these habits over time.

The strongest and most consistent evidence for the health impacts of the arts relate specifically to mental health: in particular, reductions in depression and anxiety. It should come as no surprise, then, that arts participation is associated with subjective wellbeing, or one’s perceived quality of life. Over the past several decades, growing scholarship on wellbeing has sought to address just how well a person thinks they’re doing, with ongoing development of indicator systems that, in more recent years, have begun to incorporate measures related to arts, culture, and creativity. Createquity has been interested in the connection between arts participation and subjective wellbeing for some time. In our own analysis of data from the 2012 General Social Survey, we found no relationship between having attended an exhibit or performance in the past year and one’s satisfaction with life. However, a subsequent research spotlight revealed that among a large sample of Americans, more active forms of cultural participation including playing a musical instrument, gardening, and craft-making were positively associated with life satisfaction.

Our current review of the literature suggests that while causal attribution remains difficult to pin down, arts and cultural participation probably improves self-reported happiness or life satisfaction. A 2010 study of 1,500 randomly selected Italians analyzed two data sets on general wellbeing and cultural participation, yielding surprising results: cultural experiences – in this instance, passive modes of participation such as cinema, theatre, concert, and museum going – were the second most important determinant of psychological wellbeing, second only to the incidence of diseases, and ranking above factors like job, income, and education. And while not all arts participants are necessarily “doing well,” there is some evidence that unhappy people might be worse off it not for their cultural activities. For instance, a 2008 study of 1,124 choral singers in England, Germany, and Australia found that among respondents who scored on the lowest third of the psychological wellbeing scale, singing in a choir had a significant impact on their ability to cope with physical and mental health issues, among other personal challenges. There is some work being done to explore these issues in the US, but existing data sets on wellbeing and arts participation are not as easy to cross-reference. For instance, a 2014 study found an association between arts participation and wellbeing, but the study design made it difficult to determine if it was indeed attributed to arts participation and not other factors.

From Jungle Gyms to Jobs: Education and Personal Development

Although some of the strongest evidence we’ve come across speaks to the value of participatory arts for older adults, one doesn’t have to be a senior citizen, or for that matter even an adult at all, to benefit. On balance, the evidence suggests that the impact of arts and culture on psychological wellbeing is consistent across the lifespan, as far back even as early childhood.

A recent NEA literature review found ample evidence that arts participation in early childhood (birth to eight years) promotes social and emotional development. For example, a 2013 randomized controlled trial of 102 toddlers found that those participating in classroom-based music education were more likely to increase their level of social cooperation, interaction, and independence (as reported by their teachers) than a control group that did not receive a music education program. Similarly, a 2006 study of 40 preschoolers found that those that met with a dance group for eight weeks had stronger improvements in social skills and showed noticeable reductions in shy, anxious and aggressive behavior compared to a control group.

For slightly older kids, student participation in structured arts activities enhances cognitive abilities and social skills that support learning (e.g., memory, problem-solving, and communication). A 2010 systematic review of the Culture and Sport Evidence (CASE) database in the UK concluded that participation in “structured arts activities” could increase young people’s performance on a range of indicators of cognitive and social ability. Perhaps even more importantly, there is good reason to believe that arts education programs are disproportionately impactful for lower-income children. The NEA literature review on early childhood mentioned above includes a Head Start arts education experiment with 88 preschoolers from low socioeconomic status families. Those who participated in music activities showed improved cognitive abilities and increased ability to pay attention than children in the control group that received regular Head Start instruction. According to the NEA literature review, other specific benefits to lower-income youth include increases in confidence, student behavior and social skills. These findings are consistent with those from the well-known randomized controlled trial to measure the impact of field trips to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Benefits such as enhanced critical thinking skills and improved measures of tolerance were two or three times higher for children attending schools in rural areas or that served predominantly low-income households.

An earlier systematic literature review of 188 studies, the landmark 2001 Reviewing Education and the Arts Project (REAP) study, offers another perspective on the evidence base for non-arts academic outcomes of arts education. After comparing 275 effect sizes across groups of comparable studies, the researchers found strong causal evidence for the impact of music listening on spatial-temporal reasoning; learning to play music on spatial reasoning; and classroom drama instruction on verbal skills. However, the evidence was weaker in several other areas, including most effects on reading and math performance.

Indeed, one puzzle embedded in the extensive literature on arts education is how little the aforementioned benefits to learning and cognitive capabilities seem to translate to traditional measures of academic attainment such as standardized tests. Evidence from a wide body of literature suggests that even if there is a positive effect, it is so small as to be practically meaningless. The CASE systematic review cited above found that overall, participation in structured arts activities only improved attainment in high-school-aged students (as measured by standardized tests) by one to two percent. Similarly, a review from the Education Endowment Foundation in the UK concluded that arts participation had “positive but low” effects on academic learning in English, math, and science.

A major drawback within this literature is a lack of longitudinal studies. Short-term experimental designs that assign some students to an arts program and others to a control group are useful for isolating the effects of that particular program, but they usually only measure temporary effects on participants. Both the NEA’s early childhood literature review and the Cultural Value Project note the dearth of research that might isolate the long-term effects of arts participation in childhood over a lifetime.

Arts as Economic Engine, Sort of

In contrast to the health and educational literature described above, research on the economic and social impacts of the arts does not paint as straightforward a picture of benefit to society. In some cases this is because the available research simply is not very robust (unsurprising, given that measuring effects at a community level is far more difficult than doing so at an individual level); in others, it is because the evidence is conflicting, or the implications of it unclear.

Arguably the most convincing case to be made here is that cultural assets (organizations, venues, etc.) probably contribute to higher real estate values at a neighborhood level, but this insight is complicated by questions around the potential negative impacts of gentrification. For instance, a 2013 study on how cultural districts reshape neighborhoods found evidence that cultural districts “have significant impacts on property values,” although the evidence of effects on poverty, education, and families was weaker. A 2006 case study of MASS MoCA and its surrounding neighborhood in rural Massachusetts found significant increases in property values following the opening of the contemporary art museum. Similarly, between 2006 and 2008, a multi-pronged investigation by Mark Stern and Susan Seifert’s Social Impact of the Arts Project (SIAP) revealed a relationship between concentrated cultural assets and rising real estate values. It remains unclear, however, whether this effect generates benefits for existing, non-property-owning residents, like rising income levels or job prospects, or alternatively, brings potential harm through disruption of existing population dynamics. Perhaps surprisingly, there is a general lack of evidence that the arts contribute to concrete negative neighborhood revitalization impacts like displacement, but little attention has been devoted to “fuzzier” outcomes like feeling a loss of ownership.

Another common type of research in cultural economics is the much-touted (and much-criticized) economic impact study. If you work in the arts, chances are you’ve seen a press release at some point in the past decade announcing that the arts generate some large dollar amount in revenue and impressive number of jobs in your community. Claims of this nature may be true in a literal sense, but are usually far less meaningful than they first appear. Sure, the arts industry creates jobs, but so does literally every other industry. The more relevant question is this: “do the arts spur spending in the economy that wouldn’t have happened otherwise?” Evidence for that more ambitious proposal is mixed. For example, a review of 36 studies by the UK-based What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth found that the effects of large-scale facilities on local employment are limited at best; however, the review included both cultural and sports facilities, and was heavily weighted toward the latter.

Speaking of employment, one of the few studies that examines the longer-term effects of arts and cultural participation suggests that cultural participation may contribute to capacity for innovation within the workforce. In an analysis of the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Laura Niemi compared more than 7,000 Americans’ history of arts participation as children to their career history as adults. Niemi found a strong association between interest in the visual arts in adolescence and later innovation and entrepreneurship, which held true even when controlling for personality traits associated with innovation (like a willingness to take risks) and educational attainment. Family income, however, was not tested as a control factor.

If the arts help produce more innovative individuals, it stands to reason that the presence of arts and cultural activities and creative industries in a region may contribute to increased productivity and innovation in other industries in that region. For example, a 2015 empirical study of 2,000 creative enterprises in Austria found evidence to support three theories for how creative industries affect an economy’s overall innovation performance: being a major source of innovative ideas, products and services; offering services that lend themselves to innovative activities in other enterprises; and using new technologies to encourage further development in tech production. Do creative industries similarly make a region wealthier? Maybe: a 2011 study examining the relationship between manufacturing, service, and creative industry agglomerations and the wealth of 250 European regions found that for every percent increase in employment in the creative industries, there is a little over a half-percent increase in GDP. As with much of this literature, though, including that seeking to test Richard Florida’s hypothesis that creative industries draw talented workers and employers to a region and increase wealth that way, causation and correlation are difficult to tease out.

Come Together: On the Arts and Social Cohesion

The state of the evidence is even muddier when it comes to the impact of the arts on the social fabric between and among communities. As with economic vitality, evidence in this arena suffers from a lack of experimental and quasi-experimental designs that would help us better understand the social benefits of the arts. However, much of the difficulty is also rooted in the theoretical complexities that complicate coming to a shared definition of terms in this area. Social benefits of the arts have been described by many names, including social capital, social wellbeing, social inclusion, arts for social change, and more. We even struggled with what label to use to describe benefits in this area, and consider “social cohesion” to be a preliminary designation.

One of the better-studied research topics in this area is the relationship between participation in the arts and pro-social or civic behaviors like voting, volunteering, or attending community meetings. A 2014 Arts Council England evidence review found “growing evidence that children and young people’s engagement with arts and culture has a knock-on impact on their wider social and civic participation.” More specifically, based on British and American systematic reviews, high school students who participate in the arts “are twice as likely to volunteer than those that don’t…and 20 percent more likely to vote as young adults.” However, the major problem with research of this nature is that it does not test the very plausible counter-hypothesis that a common personality trait or set of values drives both arts engagement and civic behavior. Experimental work in this area would be extremely valuable for answering that question.

What about the relationship between arts assets and indicators of social wellbeing at a neighborhood level? The best work on this front has been conducted by SIAP’s Stern and Seifert, who attempted in a recent project to analyze multiple dimensions of economic and social wellbeing in Philadelphia. Their investigation, however, failed to find correlations between cultural assets and most indicators of social wellbeing after controlling for race and economic vitality, casting significant doubt on this effect.

Can the arts help increase trust and understanding between people of different backgrounds through dialogue or creating spaces for storytelling? In the United States, Animating Democracy and SIAP have both conducted qualitative and descriptive research into this phenomenon. However, the literature is almost entirely bereft of control groups, making it difficult to draw firm conclusions. One of the few exceptions is the aforementioned Crystal Bridges study on field trip attendance, which reported an increase in tolerance and “historical empathy” among students who attended the museum compared to students who didn’t. It’s difficult to know, however, how meaningful the proxy measure used in this study is in practice. Furthermore, one of the problems for this area of research is that it seemingly matters a lot what messages are being communicated through the artwork when it comes to building bridges across social divides, complicating attempts like this one to assess in general terms whether this type of intervention “works.”

What It All Adds Up To

Last year, Createquity explored the literature on wellbeing and quality of life in general, and noted that culture is often missing from frameworks that seek to capture a holistic definition of wellbeing. This investigation, and the ongoing work that will flow from it, demonstrates how and where the arts fit most naturally into such a framework.

• Arts participation contributes directly to quality of life by increasing self-reported happiness and life satisfaction. This is probably the case for the population in general, and is almost certainly true for the subset of that population that pursues sustained engagement in arts activities over time. In addition, robust effects of arts participation on reducing anxiety and depression have been demonstrated for people in healthcare settings and older adults, two potentially vulnerable populations. This research validates Createquity’s thematic focus on ensuring equitable access to opportunities to participate in the arts across society as a whole.
• Arts participation contributes indirectly to wellbeing via, at a minimum, its effects on education and personal development (particularly the development of emotional and social skills in early childhood, and the development of cognitive capabilities and communication skills in later childhood), and physical health (particularly in healthcare settings). Other indirect effects to wellbeing may exist as well, but the research is not yet at a place where these can be demonstrated conclusively.

This review likewise highlights where additional investments in research would be especially productive. Experimental and quasi-experimental designs are extremely rare in the research on the economic and social impacts of the arts; initiatives to fill this gap, though likely expensive and difficult to implement, would prove enormously helpful in resolving many of the causation vs. correlation conundrums that currently pervade this literature. Even in the health and education areas where these techniques are more common, however, there remains considerable room for further research and greater methodological ambition. There is a strong need in these areas for studies that examine the effects of arts participation over a long period of time, and for randomized controlled trials that use larger sample sizes.

As stated in the beginning of this article, both the research literature itself and our understanding of it are works in progress. We will continue to update and adjust the infographic describing benefits as new research comes to light in the months and years to come. As we learn more about how the arts benefit lives, the knowledge will inform our ongoing inquiry into the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them.

From Flickr user Ian Brown: “The Twitter logo mod is from graffiti seen on a wall during [the 2013 Gezi Park] protests in Turkey.”

Let’s take a minute to stew on that. Commanders-in-chief of the United States have gotten involved in the arts before, but mostly to resolve disputes, not create them; to celebrate artists, not berate them. Moreover, unlike most of the controversies from the late 1980s and early 1990s at the height of the so-called culture wars, the contested speech did not involve desecration of treasured religious symbols or explicit sexual content. Only a statement of less than complete fealty to the administration-in-waiting.

It’s reasonable to wonder what the election of Donald Trump means for the arts. Trump’s was actually the only campaign during the primary season to answer Alyssa Rosenberg’s questionnaire about arts policy priorities back in March. His responses mostly articulate a free-market, libertarian-ish approach to arts policy and a willingness to delegate most of the decision-making to Congress, though he does state his opposition to net neutrality. (Oddly, he also makes a point to say that there is “no Constitutional obligation” for the president to host artists at the White House.) The day after the election, Americans for the Arts was out with a statement that emphasized bread and butter issues for the organization, including support for the National Endowment for the Arts and arts education. A few publications and organizations have attempted to grapple with the reality of Trump as president both before and after the election, trying to read tea leaves from random clues like the fact that he once trademarked the name Trump Art Collection but has yet to use it, or that Mike Pence’s wife is a painter.

But zeroing in on arts-specific policy is usually the wrong way to understand the most important issues in the arts, as my colleague Lauren Ruffin deftly pointed out in a recent post on the Fractured Atlas blog. Even for those who were predicting (or rooting for) a Trump win, the news of his accession to the Oval Office is a shock to the status quo of governance style and priorities for the Earth’s richest and most powerful nation. Trump potentially represents such a tectonic shift that events that would once have been considered drastic, like having the NEA disappear completely, could end up being small potatoes in the face of what’s to come.

At present, no one really knows what to expect from the Trump administration. Predictions are flying fast and furious, and run the gamut from our core institutions and policies will remain intact to Trump won’t even get through his first full term to Trump will usher in a new era of authoritarian dystopia from which we may never recover. Though wildly disparate, I would argue that these three basic paradigms – the aspirational statesman, the incompetent nepotist, and the dictator-in-chief – in combination form a good model of what to expect, as I think we have seen all of them in Trump and his team throughout the campaign and now during the transition period.

While the paradigms are not mutually exclusive, it matters a lot for our collective wellbeing which of them ends up becoming dominant, and which of them are reinforced by the rest of our governing infrastructure and society. This is true not only for the United States but the rest of the world as well. Arguably never before in human history has so much power been placed in the hands of someone with so little respect for convention and so unbeholden to anyone other than himself. President Trump is about to have at his disposal the world’s largest military and nuclear arsenal, the vast spying powers of the NSA, and a massive regulatory and law enforcement apparatus. In peacetime, the nation’s system of checks and balances — Congressional oversight committees, whistleblower protections, etc. — may be robust enough to prevent significant abuses of that power. The truly telling moments are likely to be those that take place just after a major terrorist attack on American soil, or after a naked provocation by the likes of North Korea, when US citizens will be under tremendous pressure to close ranks and show loyalty to the commander-in-chief. How we respond to moves on the administration’s part to consolidate power will be hugely consequential for the future of our democracy.

And that’s where the arts come in. If Donald Trump wants a playbook for bending the democratic institutions of the United States to his will, he unfortunately has plenty of recent examples from which to draw:

• In Russia, of course, Vladimir Putin has effectively instituted one-party rule by using the power of the regulatory state and control of the national media (not to mention, allegedly, targeted assassinations) to neutralize political opponents and grassroots opposition alike. It’s important to remember that though he now seems to rule Russia with an iron fist, Putin originally came to power via the will of the people; he was democratically elected President of Russia in 2000. Art and media are by no means exempt: Putin’s Russia shames cultural dissidents on national television, engages in modern propaganda techniques and “information warfare” to pursue its agenda abroad, and crushes local cultural planning efforts if they are too independent, just to name a few recent examples. The Denmark-based organization Freemuse deemed Russia the third-worst enemy of artistic expression in the world last year, as measured by confirmed instances of politically-motivated prosecutions, threats, and physical attacks against artists.
• In Turkey, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is following in Putin’s footsteps in many ways, despite tensions between the two leaders. Erdoğan was first elected Prime Minister in 2003, and has gradually manipulated the political system to remain in power since then. Once considered a relatively moderate leader during his first years in office due to his pro-Western orientation (Turkey has been trying to gain membership in the European Union for over a decade), Erdoğan rapidly accelerated his embrace of repressive policies after the 2011 elections. A “culture war” that began that year when Erdoğan felt his daughter was disrespected during a theater performance when she was in the audience (sound familiar?) has since spurred increasing attempts to exercise political control over the state arts funding apparatus. Erdoğan used an unsuccessful coup attempt earlier this year as an excuse to crack down even more on free speech, shutting down and seizing the assets of 29 publishing houses accused of aiding the enemy, and jailing more than 120 journalists. (In researching this item, I discovered that a Turkish publication Createquity linked to when reporting on these controversies two years ago was among the victims of this purge.) The aforementioned Freemuse claims that Turkey and Russia belong, along with China, Iran, and Syria, to “a special league of countries that systematically repress freedom of expression,” with more than half of the recorded violations against artists worldwide originating in those nations.
• In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (who has already received an invitation to Washington from President-elect Donald Trump) pushed through a series of legislation and constitutional reforms tightening controls on the media with the help of an elected parliamentary supermajority following his election in 2010. The ensuing changes to the environment have prompted the watchdog organization Freedom House to downgrade Hungary’s press environment rating from “Free” to “Partly Free.” Meanwhile, a shadowy right-wing organization called the Hungarian Academy of Arts has asserted increasing control over arts institutions in the country following its transition from an independent private organization to an official government body.
• We are arguably seeing the earliest iterations of this story now in Israel, where controversial culture minister Miri Regev has made no secret of her desire to reshape Israel’s cultural establishment in her ultranationalist image. A former chief censor for the military, she has expressed contempt for the notion of an independent public media. And a group of Israeli artists and arts organizations is suing her ministry over threats to withdraw funding from organizations that refuse to perform in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and other so-called “loyalty tests.”

We see in each of these examples how the arts, artists, and media are often among the first to be singled out when an authoritarian government seeks to impose itself on the people. Indeed, when considering issues in the arts globally, freedom of expression is arguably at or near the top of the list, given that well over a billion people live under a regime in China that actively seeks to control its citizens’ access to information and ideas. With a Trump presidency on its way, that issue looms with new urgency over the United States as well. In the coming months, Createquity will be watching the administration and Congressional leadership closely for any attempts to consolidate power or exert control over the media, as these issues are now intricately connected with the health of the arts ecosystem in America.

Other arts issues and research questions that have arguably become more urgent, present, or resonant with this election outcome include:

• Under what conditions are arts for social change efforts and arts-based anti-oppression strategies effective at shifting societal attitudes towards greater tolerance and empathy for others?
• What are the ingredients of successful social movements, and do the arts have a role to play?
• Are there disparities in access to the arts and opportunities to make a living as an artist by geography, particularly in rural areas, and does this have an effect on political discourse?

If we are looking for ways the arts and artists can play a productive role in the healing of our nation, the above questions are most likely to get us there. The 2016 election laid bare not only a seething undercurrent of bigotry and xenophobia in our midst, but also just how politically and culturally segregated America has become. Are the arts part of the solution? Have they been part of the problem? We ought to find out.

Twisting a vibrant democracy such as the United States toward authoritarianism is hard work, and it’s not clear yet whether Trump will be up to the challenge. But make no mistake: we are in a vulnerable position. Support the media sources you trust, by subscribing or donating, as they will need your help more than ever. Support organizations such as the ACLU that will be looking to contain abuses through the judiciary system. Talk frequently to the Trump supporters who may be in your life and seek to understand them so they may be more inclined to understand you. Lobby your elected officials and start organizing now to prevent an expansion of the administration’s reach in Congress in 2018 and beyond, which also means getting involved at the state and local level (state legislatures will be redistricting Congressional districts for the next decade in the next two years). Watch out for any move on the part of the Senate to eliminate the filibuster – if that happens, it is a bad sign.

And finally, don’t forget to support artists. If we don’t, who will?

• Singing improves mental health and subjective wellbeing (i.e., perceived quality of life)
• Taking dance classes bolsters cognition and motor skills, and even lessens the likelihood of developing dementia later in life
• Playing a musical instrument has myriad positive effects, including dementia risk reduction
• Visual arts practice generates increases in social engagement, psychological health and self-esteem

Just how the arts benefit society is one of the most studied topics in arts research, to the extent that multiple literature reviews, most notably the RAND Corporation’s decade-old landmark Gifts of the Muse, have sought to compile our collective knowledge on the subject. In recent years, several important initiatives and publications have added to this evidence base, including the final report earlier this year from the UK-based Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Cultural Value Project and National Endowment for the Arts’s 2011 literature review on the arts and human development. Over the past few months, Createquity has been reviewing these and other publications with an eye toward creating a continually-updated catalogue of demonstrated impacts for arts activities. What are all of the ways in which the arts contribute to or detract from wellbeing, and how strong is the evidence supporting each of those claims?

Our review of the literature addressing these questions yielded a surprising result: the most compelling evidence of the value of the arts revolves around improving the lives of older adults. Better understanding the relationship between the arts and aging may help to identify areas for improvement in future research into wellbeing, as well as opportunities for investing in the quality of life of older individuals.

Painter — photo by Flickr user M-n-M

The global population is aging in unprecedented numbers and living longer than ever. Between 1980 and 2010, a period marking most of millennials’ present lifetimes, the number of U.S. centenarians increased by nearly two-thirds! Longer lifespans bring immediate implications for many and eventual implications for us all, if we’re lucky. While extending the so-called golden years can be a blessing, challenges include deteriorating health, social isolation, loss of loved ones, and life transitions.

Fortunately, research shows that arts-related interventions can help (in some cases, more so than traditional Western medicine). In particular, there is substantial causal evidence that participatory arts activities help to maintain the health and quality of life of older adults. These benefits, detailed below, include improvements in cognitive and tactile abilities, subjective wellbeing, and dementia risk reduction (although the effects on managing dementia are less clear).

Jamming and Grooving Towards Better Health

The literature on the effects of participatory arts engagement within aging populations is significant not only for the breadth of demonstrated benefits to older adults, but also the relatively high quality of evidence supporting these claims.

Most of the literature we encountered involved making music, although a number were focused on dance. Music and movement activities (playing instruments, singing, dancing) have been shown to improve mental and physical health among older adults. In a randomized controlled trial of 212 British adults over the age of 60, those who participated in weekly singing groups over three months were found to have had improved mental health (decreased anxiety and depression) compared to those who didn’t. These health effects were mostly sustained over a period of at least three months after the weekly singing ended. By contrast, the positive effects of instrument playing do not always persist over the longer term following participation, unless participants have trained or practiced over an extended period of their lives. This might explain why lifelong engagement with music, particularly playing an instrument, is correlated with improved memory among older adults ─ and why some older musicians, like Herbie Hancock at a solid 76, still perform with as much gusto now as they did in their prime. Despite a smaller sample size, another randomized controlled trial of 35 adults aged 60 and over suggested health benefits of dance for older adults. Those who took weekly dance classes over a six-month period showed improved cognition and attention, posture and balance, and hand/motor skills like steadiness and aim in comparison to the control group.

Other research points to the role of the arts in improving overall quality of life for older adults more generally, such as attitudes toward social life. For example, an evaluation of a different, yearlong weekly singing program for adults aged 60 and over revealed marked improvements in emotional wellbeing, especially for those who had been widowed. A mixed-methods study of the effects of painting lessons among older adults in the same age range documented similar improvements in both mental health and social wellbeing. After having participated in these professionally conducted lessons, participants noted increases in social engagement, their sense of belonging, and self awareness and understanding. Likewise, a randomized controlled trial of 50 older adults who participated in 12 visual art sessions over a month showed improvements in self-esteem and anxiety reduction. No wonder your grandmother was always in a good mood after watercoloring class, treating you to ice cream when you picked her up!

Doses of Art to Stay Lucid?

Every 66 seconds, an American develops Alzheimer’s disease. It is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, and kills more people than breast cancer and prostate cancer combined. As the population ages, millions will be affected: the number of Americans with the disease will double between 2015 and 2050. With soaring diagnoses come soaring costs ─ financial, emotional, and social ─ for patients and their caregivers. Establishment of accessible and cost-effective methods of delaying Alzheimer’s disease and other dementia-related illnesses is crucial.

A 21-year longitudinal study of 469 older adults aged 75 and over published in 2003 found that playing an instrument, reading, and playing board games were strongly associated with lower incidence of dementia. In fact, those who scored in the highest third on the study’s cognitive-activity scale had a 63 percent lower risk of dementia than those in the lowest third. Dancing was the only physical activity to show similar effects.

Arts engagement also seems to benefit older adults who already have dementia, providing improved communication, cognitive function, self-esteem and social participation. TimeSlips, a creative storytelling program for people with dementia, appears to promote engagement, alertness and social interaction among participating adults, as well as improved attitudes among caregivers towards their patients. On the other hand, a 2013 report from the National Endowment for the Arts cites a review of 24 studies that presents a more mixed picture of the evidence, with music interventions leading to both positive and negative outcomes for individuals in severe stages of dementia-related illness. It’s also important to note that methodological challenges abound in this area of research, including confounding external factors related to social context, interrelated variables, and inconsistent outcome measures, all of which makes drawing firm conclusions difficult.

In fact, a separate literature review by Tony Noice et al. notes similar shortcomings in a broader set of research on participatory arts for older adults. As a general rule, research on the benefits of the arts lags behind the level of rigor frequently encountered in the broader universe of scientific research. So while the evidence described above is quite strong by arts research standards, it nevertheless has limitations. Other opportunities for improvement, according to Noice et al., include introducing more standardized assessment of interventions across art forms and measuring effects over a longer period of time. Though the work to date has been promising, until studies on the effectiveness of arts interventions for older adults more consistently meet rigorous standards, their ability to shape perception of the value of such programs will remain limited.

Music has powers — photo by Flickr user Jinx McCombs

As mentioned earlier, we discovered this wealth of literature on arts and aging as part of a larger inquiry into the benefits of the arts in general. That inquiry, in turn, extends a longer-term initiative on Createquity’s part to reconcile the benefits of arts and culture with broader theories of wellbeing (or quality of life), such as the capability approach. Our next article will explore some of the other areas of benefit that have been claimed for arts participation, along with an assessment of the evidence backing up those claims.

In the meantime, rest assured knowing the older people in your life who participate in the arts are not just pursuing a silly pastime. For some, it might just be the key to a worry-free life or a still-taut mind ─ all the more reason to encourage them to channel their inner Aretha, Baryshnikov, or Picasso.

The plays of a real Negro theatre must be: One: About us. That is, they must have plots which reveal Negro life as it is. Two: By us. That is, they must be written by Negro authors who understand from birth and continual association just what it means to be a Negro today. Three: For us. That is, the theatre must cater primarily to Negro audiences and be supported and sustained by their entertainment and approval. Four: Near us. The theatre must be in a Negro neighborhood near the mass of ordinary Negro people.

–W.E.B. Du Bois, from the program for the Krigwa Players Little Negro Theater in 1925, reprinted in Crisis magazine (published by the NAACP) in 1926

About us. By us. For us. Near us. It has been almost a century since the great W.E.B. Du Bois–one of the co-founders of the NAACP–offered this stirring call for what, today, we would call “cultural equity.” To say much has happened in those ninety years would be to oversimplify. Significant progress has been made. And yet for many, and on many levels, it is not enough. In a speech given just last year, Jeff Chang, executive director of Stanford’s Institute for Diversity in the Arts, exclaimed: “at a moment when…our images depict us as one happy rainbow nation, and yet the structures of power, including the national culture complex…is still overwhelmingly white, we begin to recognize that we have not yet achieved cultural equity.”

It is certainly not for lack of effort–a deep, ongoing, heroic effort by dedicated activists, institutions, artists, funders, and even the government. And yet, read Chang–and below, Campbell, Lowry, Rosen, Erickson, Kourlas, Sonntag, Vega, and Grams–and one thing soon becomes clear: “cultural equity” means different things to different people. Over the course of some ninety years, distinct, and sometimes competing, visions of success have jostled for attention, complicating a complex conversation, and creating tensions that often go unresolved. Diverse goals and desired outcomes–over time and between different groups–have made change a juggling act; meanwhile, efforts to add on fixes to a system that was not built with equity in mind have met with mixed results.

Just as we cannot solve a problem with the same mindset that created it, we cannot achieve cultural democracy or equity with the same tools, strategies, and structures that built and have maintained our current inequitable systems. To move forward, we must look, think, and act widely.

–Figuring the Plural, a research report about ethnocultural organizations published in 2014

The past few years have been deeply trying for race relations in the United States. The rise of the Black Lives Matter movement in response to widely publicized violence against unarmed black people at the hands of private citizens and the police, along with an increasing anti-immigration rhetoric on the political stage, have given new urgency to initiatives focusing on decreasing racial inequality and combating racial bias. The relevance of cultural equity in the nonprofit arts world is all the more immediate against this backdrop. As borne out by the results of our reader poll earlier this year, along with our own observations, perhaps no other issue is more present for arts professionals in 2016 than this.

Many of the core issues in today’s debate around cultural equity harken back to the beginning of arts in America. As outlined in our earlier article on growth and change in the nonprofit arts sector, the “beginning” here can be traced to the 19th century, when, in the aftermath of the Civil War and amid an influx of immigration, a new class of urban white commercial elites established institutions–such as Metropolitan Museum of Art and Metropolitan Opera, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra–to preserve and present art in the classical European canon. While these well-heeled individuals–America’s early philanthropists–sought to promote civic pride and validate America’s position as a “civilized” world power, they also used these institutions to establish and protect their own class status. It was not until the 1960s that private philanthropy began to focus on broader cultural expressions. By then, however, this structural disparity, which showered the lion’s share of philanthropic funding and policy attention on art forms originating in Western European traditions and wealthy organizations upholding those traditions, had thoroughly defined the very word “arts” as well as nearly all of the infrastructure associated with it.

Institutional efforts to bring equity to the arts have a long history. The African American theater tradition envisioned by DuBois at the opening of this article, for example, was developed in part thanks to New Deal programs in the 1930s. Since then, the federal and some state governments have stepped in for periods of time to create dedicated funding streams for organizations rooted in communities of color. In 1968, the New York State Council on the Arts launched its Ghetto Arts Program (later wisely renamed the Special Arts Services Program), which provided opportunities for black artists to work in their communities, and three years later, the nascent National Endowment for the Arts launched the Expansion Arts Program, designed to support “community-based arts activities.”

The NEA has succeeded in encouraging programmatic diversity in terms of the projects offered by a wide range of institutions. What it now requires is structural diversity that is within the boards, staffs, and patronage systems of institutions.

– Mary Schmidt Campbell, former executive director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, and NYC Cultural Affairs Commissioner [From her 1998 A New Mission for the NEA]

Many of these policy interventions, however, ultimately proved fleeting in the face of shifting political winds, especially at the federal level. Undeterred, several generations of artists and activists worked in the latter half of the 20th century to support participation in and expression of cultural heritage, sometimes with the help of private philanthropy and sometimes without any outside help at all. The fruits of those efforts today include a number of prominent institutions presenting works by artists of color, several national service organizations such as the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures and Association of African American Museums, and thousands of ethnocultural organizations providing important services within their communities.

In my own experience I have found that ethnic origin is not a bar to artistic response if there is equal access. I cannot believe that persons of color do not respond to good art.

–W. McNeil Lowry, former Vice President of the Ford Foundation who launched the foundation’s arts funding program, in a 1991 article in response to the
Arts and Government report from the American Assembly

In recent years, cultural equity has once again risen to the top of the national arts agenda in the United States. From coast to coast, foundations, arts councils, advocacy organizations, universities and others have doubled down on their commitment to diversity and equity in the arts. Though many factors have led to that shift, a clearly pivotal moment was the 2011 publication of Holly Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change.” A monograph completed as part of the National Committee on Responsive Philanthropy’s review of social justice grantmaking practices in various fields, “Fusing” reported figures suggesting that the majority of arts funding in the United States does not benefit communities of color, and called decisively for change. Grantmakers in the Arts gave substantial visibility to the report and its ideas within the arts funding community over a period of several years, which culminated in the organization releasing a statement of purpose detailing its commitment to racial equity in arts philanthropy in April of 2015.

[S]ocial inequities continue to be reflected in the funding practices of private philanthropy and governmental funders in the arts. Therefore, in order to more equitably support ALAANA [African, Latino(a), Asian, Arab, and Native American] communities, arts organizations, and artists, funders should take explicit actions to structurally change funding behaviors and norms.

–Grantmakers in the Arts, Racial Equity in Arts Philanthropy Statement of Purpose

Sidford’s and GIA’s calls for equity have reverberated with increasing volume among other national service organizations, local arts agencies, and foundations across the land. In 2014, following in the footsteps of a Mellon Foundation program to increase the diversity of curatorial staff at encyclopedic museums, the American Alliance of Museums released a diversity and inclusion policy statement. In the past two years, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission have engaged in something of a bicoastal dance, with the former conducting a study of the diversity of the arts organizations it funds and the latter undertaking a Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative to improve “diversity in cultural organizations, in the areas of their leadership, staffing, programming and audience composition.” Americans for the Arts, the national service organization that represents these and other local arts councils, released its own widely circulated and discussed Statement on Cultural Equity in May of this year.

I heartily support the NCRP report’s recommendation that philanthropic investment in the arts should benefit underserved communities and promote greater equity, opportunity, and justice. But I take issue with the suggestion that foundation support to large-budget organizations and those that perform the Western canon is, by definition, at odds with these goals.

–Jesse Rosen, League of American Orchestras, 2011

Our goal here is not to present a detailed history of the movement for cultural equity. Folks far more qualified than us have done so already. Instead, we are more interested in looking forward: what is the change we collectively want to create, and what will it take to make that change happen?

At Createquity, we are on a long-term mission to investigate the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them. Yet in order to use research and evidence to help our sector move forward, we must have a clear, and shared, understanding of what success looks like. And therein lies the rub: the further we delved into the literature around cultural equity, and the more we consulted experts and connected with some of the activists who precede us, the more we came to realize that shared understanding simply doesn’t exist.

That there are different visions for cultural equity is clear. Where exactly the lines are drawn, however, is somewhat less so. There is an inherent difficulty in examining positions forged through dialogue via documents authored by a few, and any attempt to develop a taxonomy will have its flaws. But in our own conversations, we found it helpful to divide the visions for success we were reading and hearing from advocates into four archetypes: Diversity, Prosperity, Redistribution, and Self-Determination. In the rest of this article, we present the differences between these visions, and consider the implications for a healthy arts ecosystem.

Let’s take a closer look.

Vision One: Diversity

There is another argument for inclusion, one that is at least as powerful as inequity in employment, and that is what it means for the audience to see a fully inclusive world on our stages….

–Brad Erickson, Executive Director of Theatre Bay Area, March 2016

The one thing that everyone in the cultural equity conversation seems to agree on is that so-called “mainstream” institutions–a community’s big-budget nonprofit symphonies, art museums, presenters, etc–are far too homogeneous. The “Diversity” vision for cultural equity seeks to rectify this, calling for these institutions to become more reflective of the communities they serve.

What does that actually mean in practice? Over the course of the past half-century, conversations about diversity have tended to focus first on audiences, then on programming, and finally on leadership. Diversity’s core concern is about who is ultimately benefiting from the work; if diverse audiences are taking advantage, then that is the surest sign of success. Many early efforts thus adopted the theme of “access” to the arts, on the assumption that underrepresented audiences wanted to participate but could not because of barriers like cost or convenience. Gradually, however, as organizations discovered that simply offering free events and pursuing more targeted marketing wasn’t enough, the focus shifted to artists themselves–who was on stage, on the page, on the walls, on screen, or coming out of the speakers–and the cultural narratives they represented. In recent years, attention has turned more and more to the staffs and boards of arts organizations as advocates have sought to diversify the decision-makers behind the scenes. Thus, whereas the Diversity vision began as a simple push for more diverse audiences, today it calls for change at the infrastructural level in addition to the programmatic level.

“Misty Copeland, American Ballet Theatre” by flickr user Kent G Becker

More than equality is at stake when Ms. Copeland—the first African-American principal female dancer in the [American Ballet Theater’s] 75-year history—dances. When a company is diverse, the audience becomes more diverse, too, and for those faced with aging, dwindling audiences, that is priceless.

– Gia Kourlas, New York Times, 2015

Why do mainstream institutions and their stakeholders care about diversity? Much of the interest springs from a recognition of the changing demographics of America. Non-Hispanic whites have made up a smaller proportion of the US population in every Census since 1940, and the Census Bureau projects that people of color will become the majority nationwide by 2044. Meanwhile, figures from the National Endowment for the Arts show a long-term decline in rates of participation in so-called “benchmark” art forms (a definition that includes classical music, jazz, opera, plays, ballet, and visits to an art museum or gallery), as well as relatively lower engagement from non-white, young, poorer, and less-educated audiences. These statistics pose a strong threat to the narrative of universal relevance that many mainstream organizations actively promote, particularly when such institutions are located in heavily diversified downtown urban cores. The more an individual feels reflected within the culture of a mainstream institution, it is assumed, the more comfortable that individual will be engaging with the institution’s programming. If that reflection is not taking place, a significant proportion of the population is being left out in systematic ways.

While many proponents see Diversity as morally righteous on the strength of these arguments alone, there is a solid business case for relevance too. If the assumption above is true, mainstream institutions have a better chance of making out in the long run if they can successfully engage more members of their ever-shifting communities through diversification strategies.

Vision Two: Prosperity

It’s an incredibly appealing product. Ailey is an admirable company that has capitalized on its artistic strengths to ensure its financial future.

–Douglas C. Sonntag, director of dance at the National Endowment for the Arts, referring to Ailey’s artistic product, staff, and board, quoted in a 2004 article for the Washington Post

Though Diversity is unmistakably a call for change, its supporters share early American philanthropists’ faith that the institutions they founded can and must play a central, unifying role in the cultural life of their communities. Not everyone agrees.

The Prosperity vision takes Diversity’s belief in the power of organizational scale and applies it to institutions started and led by artists of color. These institutions follow the standard model of nonprofit growth–cultivating a wide audience, a fundraising board, diversified streams of income, and professional staff–all with an eye toward long-term sustainability. Though rarely stated outright, an underlying assumption of Prosperity is that large, established institutions of color will last longer, and thus provide more benefit to society over many generations, than an ecosystem of smaller organizations that may be more transitory in nature.

What we are calling the Prosperity vision evolved out of the success of a cohort of pioneering artists who created their own organizations in the late 1950s through the1970s in response to a lack of existing opportunities for pursuing their creative work. Many of these artists adopted the nonprofit model that was gaining ground during that period in order to improve their access to philanthropic resources. The seminal organizations they founded–like the Free Southern Theater, El Teatro Campesino, Studio Museum in Harlem, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and the Negro Ensemble Company, among others–received sustained support from private foundations early in their history, and the legacies of those organizations play an important role today both in the cultural life of their communities and more broadly.

Negro Ensemble Company National Tour, 1968 (source)

The Prosperity vision lives on in several more recent institutions, including the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in Pittsburgh and the Smithsonian’s Museum of African American History and Culture, set to open this September in Washington, DC. It is worth noting that, like many of their predecessors, both of these institutions came to be thanks to a collaboration between one or more artists or advocates of color and a white champion or champions. The August Wilson Center materialized when Pittsburgh mayor Thomas J. Murphy, Jr. accepted a challenge from the local NAACP president, Tim Stevens, to organize a funding drive for the new institution that Stevens had dreamed up. Representative John Lewis (D-GA) introduced legislation for an African American Smithsonian museum and tried for many years to get it through Congress; it finally passed because of support from a new Smithsonian head, Lawrence M. Small. This pattern of community leaders of different races forming alliances to celebrate artists of color is highly characteristic of the Prosperity vision.

Vision Three: Redistribution

Eurocentric aesthetic products continue to be viewed as superior to those of people of color and poor white communities. Funders from both the public and private agencies have historically invested in institutions and art forms that reflect their assumed superiority; they have consistently under resourced and underfunded the art forms that they consider marginal, ethnic, folk, etc.

–Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, president and founder of the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, in a 2016 online conversation posted to the Center’s website.

Diversity and Prosperity both embrace the standard market dynamics of the nonprofit arts sector, in which a small number of high-profile institutions dominate. By contrast, the Redistribution vision favors a larger pool of recipients for contributed income, particularly from grantmakers. Advocates of Redistribution argue that people of color, rural communities, LGBT communities, and others are socially and economically marginalized by our society and therefore have less access to wealth to support their work in the arts. The cultural contributions of these communities have likewise been devalued by arts funders historically. An equitable distribution–a redistribution–of funds towards organizations originating in and serving marginalized communities is the best way to address this imbalance. For advocates of Redistribution, therefore, a shift in the funding paradigm is what’s most urgently needed to achieve cultural equity.

The Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute was founded in New York City in 1976 by Dr. Marta Moreno Vega, pictured here third from the left. (Source)

Unlike Prosperity’s institution-centric frame, Redistribution focuses on the full ecosystem of individuals and institutions that comprise a community. A core belief of Redistribution is that all participants–from large institutions to one-person operations–should be afforded the opportunity to succeed. (Advocates of Redistribution don’t have a problem with large institutions that celebrate artists of color, as long as smaller organizations are able to share in the wealth.) Beyond the inherent justice in giving funds to oppressed groups, advocates point to the country’s changing demographics as additional justification for Redistribution. For advocates of Redistribution, it is more efficient to accomplish the goals of cultural equity by redirecting resources to organizations with already diverse staff and audiences rather than to put effort into diversifying mainstream organizations.

Redistribution gained a significant boost of attention from the publication of Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture and Social Change,” which is perhaps best known for a much-cited statistic that just 2% of arts organizations in the United States receive more than half of total contributed income. Many of the most difficult conversations about arts policy in America in the past several years have centered on the future of longstanding public and private funding streams supporting those institutions in the proverbial 2%. That’s because many of those streams were set up following the logic that the size of an organization’s budget is its own justification for the amount of funding it receives.

For example, in the Denver region, small arts groups make up 90% of the organizations funded by the local Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, but share only 16% of the pie. These so-called “Tier III” organizations demanded a more equitable distribution of resources last year, arguing the current distribution was unfair and biased toward Denver’s big cultural institutions. (Redistribution advocates mostly lost that particular battle.) Another conflagration erupted in San Francisco in 2014, after the city released a damning study on the allocations to organizations serving communities of color through its Grants for the Arts (GFTA) agency. Cultural equity activists asked that resources be redirected from GFTA to the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Cultural Equity Grants program, eventually winning a commitment of more than $2 million in new funds from Mayor Ed Lee. Major sources of operating support to arts organizations in New York City, Cincinnati, Cleveland, and beyond operate in a similar tiered or graduated system.

Vision Four: Self-Determination

We finally determined that self-sustainability is not how many memberships or season subscriptions you have or any of those things. It’s if we lost our funding, if there was a global downturn, if the ferry stopped running, if any of these things happened, who’s going to keep the doors to the Debaj Creation Centre open? Who’s going to be standing there with us when the funding is gone? Oh, our neighbors, our friends, our families, the people around us, that’s who this matters to, that’s who our sustainability is linked to. No one else… It’s right here, it’s the people right around us. So our absolute priority has got to be the relationships with those closest to us…

–Figuring the Plural, The Debajehmujig Creation Centre case study, published in 2014

You may have noticed that each successive vision on this list represents a further rejection of the status quo. Self-Determination, in many ways, is the most radical departure of all. The Self-Determination theory of cultural equity calls for full participation in and expression of cultural life for communities of color through models that are organic to those communities, and that look beyond established nonprofit arts funding and advocacy tactics.

At its zenith, Self-Determination seeks nothing less than wholesale societal and cultural transformation. With Self-Determination, ownership of cultural decisions is located within the community: it’s the community members themselves who get to shape cultural life. Advocates of Self-Determination view the current nonprofit and funding system in the United States with heavy skepticism. To them, its legacy of racism and class hegemony is still very much alive today, and will remain so as long as it continues to be largely controlled by the same wealthy, white elite class that founded it.

Because of this history, Self-Determination questions the notion that people of color could ever feel truly welcome engaging with mainstream nonprofit organizations, regardless of changes to programming or diversification of staff, as imagined in Diversity. Furthermore, working within the system to grow nonprofits led by artists of color, as imagined in Prosperity, validates and perpetuates white capitalist models of success, and often takes decision-making power out of the hands of the community. Finally, as these disparities of access are the direct result of global white supremacy, resolving them will require moving beyond Redistribution to dismantling the inherently racist elements of the system and/or creating alternative elements outside of it. This thinking naturally leads to an emphasis on the application of art towards social justice goals, and a de-emphasis of the traditional nonprofit model — though advocates do agree that subsidy for arts projects and organizations remains important.

“Protest” by flickr user S Pakhrin

Self-Determination sees the battleground for cultural equity extending well beyond the nonprofit arts sector as conventionally conceived. For many, devaluing of non-European culture starts in the education system. Communities of color have unequal access to quality public education in general, including arts education. What arts education they do receive tends to emphasize European art forms and works by white artists. Advocates argue that the valuable contributions that members of oppressed communities have made to society should be validated by the prestigious label of “art” in curricula.

Advocates of this vision also note that a large portion of opportunities to participate in the arts exist outside of the nonprofit sector, and argue this is especially true for people of color. Many organizations outside of the professional nonprofit arts sector play an important role in the cultural life of communities of color: churches, social service agencies, businesses, small volunteer nonprofits, and unincorporated community groups. Self-Determination argues that these organizations should also be eligible for arts subsidy, and that distribution of that subsidy should honor the goals and approaches of those organizations rather than prescribing measures of success or activities that are not generated by the community.

Fault Lines

The above list of visions represents a distillation, though we hope not too much an oversimplification, of the efforts, thinking and successes of many different advocates over many years. It’s important to acknowledge that these visions are not mutually exclusive, nor are their advocates. They exist in dialogue with each other, and it’s not unusual to hear a single person endorse aspects of different visions at different points in the same conversation. Yet that should not blind us to the reality that in practice, the tensions between these ideas can be a source of great confusion if they are not called out explicitly.

In particular, we perceive five key fault lines running across and through these visions as we’ve laid them out:

The Role of Race
Cultural equity is a conversation that is rooted in, but not exclusively about, race. While race is undeniably important to all four visions of success, they each incorporate other aspects of identity and community infrastructure in subtly distinct ways. Diversity often starts from a reference point of race, but advocates for Diversity frequently encounter pressure to include measures of social difference such as age, class, and disability status. Prosperity tends to be squarely focused on artists of color, but the Redistribution and Self-Determination visions are more directly aligned with the social justice movement, and thus consider LGBT, rural and other frames alongside race (albeit from an intersectional perspective). Because Redistribution and Self-Determination consider community to be defined by heritage, they often treat marginalized white ethnic communities as part of the same conversation as communities of color. Finally, Self-Determination is particularly sensitive to class considerations, given its skeptical orientation towards capitalism.

The Value (and Cost) of Integration
Echoing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream that “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers,” the Diversity vision is in love with the idea of people coming together to understand and celebrate their differences. Yet for some activists, the expectation to share and share alike implied by this utopian, color-blind harmony ignores oppressed groups’ right to meaningful control of resources, traditions, and spaces that they can call their own. The Prosperity, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination visions all incorporate elements of ownership based on common heritage and identity, with no explicit obligation to be inclusive toward other cultures within those contexts.

The Centrality of Institutions
There are stark differences between the visions in how they value (or don’t value) institutions and the traditional ways of growing and running them. Diversity and Prosperity see institutions as vital infrastructure with enormous potential for community benefit. Redistribution sees value in institutions too, but is also keenly aware of how institutional values (e.g., prioritizing financial growth, sustainability, and formal structures) have historically been biased against communities of color. Self-Determination thinks institutional values are a corrupting influence and rejects the idea of institutions being the only model of health, questioning even bedrock institutions like the nonprofit sector itself.

Cultural Norms
Implicitly, Diversity and Prosperity embrace several core elements of dominant American culture that Redistribution and Self-Determination tend to be wary of. One of the most important of these norms involves using an individual rather than group lens to talk about benefits and harm. The difference can be seen in how Diversity and Prosperity very often celebrate or cultivate specific people of color, LGBT individuals, etc., whereas Redistribution and Self-Determination more frequently speak of impacts on, and seek to represent, whole communities. Redistribution and Self-Determination also tend to see culture as defined more by heritage than creativity, placing a relatively higher value on elders, ancestors, and tradition, and critiquing Diversity and Prosperity’s emphasis on originality and individual expression in the context of judging artistic merit. Finally, Redistribution and especially Self-Determination see social consciousness as an important element of artistic work, and are less excited about purely abstract expressions.

The Money
The Redistribution vision sees a lack of access to financial capital as the principal (or at least most immediate) source of problems and restored access to foundation and government funding as the solution. Like Diversity and Prosperity, Redistribution thus implicitly buys into a capitalist framework. The Self-Determination vision, on the other hand, sees capitalism as a white supremacist institution and is more interested in creating spaces and contexts for communities of color to have full control over their circumstances, even if that means leaving money on the table.

Examining real-life debates in the context of these fault lines can be instructive. We noted earlier that many cultural-equity-themed battles in recent years have involved Redistribution trying to chip away at funding streams that disproportionately favor mainstream institutions. Often in response, mainstream institutions will seek to highlight their Diversity bona fides. In a 2011 forum hosted by Grantmakers in the Arts inviting responses to Holly Sidford’s “Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change,” the president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, Jesse Rosen, pointed out that the majority of concerts presented by his organization’s membership “are specifically dedicated to education or community engagement,” highlighting efforts such as “the South Dakota Symphony’s recent tour of their state to perform on three Lakota reservations with a newly commissioned orchestral work by a Lakota composer.” But in a post in the same forum the next day (trenchantly titled “So What’s New?”), Marta Moreno Vega described efforts at diversification by organizations rooted in a Western European tradition as “patronizing.”

A conflict between Prosperity and Redistribution was at the root of reactions to a controversial report issued by the DeVos Institute of Arts Management in 2015. The report investigated the financial and management challenges facing higher-budget black and Latino arts organizations, and concluded the field would be better served if funders provided larger grants to a smaller pool of promising organizations, even if that meant cutting funding to smaller organizations within communities of color. “It’s not politically easy or palatable, but it’s a potential solution that does need to be considered,” suggested DeVos Institute chair Michael Kaiser in defense of the report’s recommendations. This argument provoked a firestorm of criticism: Grantmakers in the Arts released a statement charging that the report “lacks the real understanding of the barriers faced by many of these organizations to surviving and thriving in the nonprofit marketplace,” while Jason Tseng’s widely circulated editorial cartoon highlighted the absurdity of suggesting that black and Latino organizations duke it out Hunger Games-style. In many ways, reactions like these surfaced the reality that, although Prosperity was once considered a daring and progressive vision, it is now increasingly seen as retrograde absent the additional value of Redistribution.

Finally, an especially instructive case study is the institutional arc of El Museo del Barrio, in New York City, which surfaced tensions between the ideals of Prosperity and the goals of Self-Determination. Founded by Puerto Rican activists and educators in 1969 with funding from the New York State Board of Regents, the museum originally had the mission of increasing representation for Puerto Rican culture. After losing much of its funding in the 1970s, El Museo broadened its mission to encompass art by all Latin American artists, transitioned leadership on the board from community members to individuals with traditional gallery and art world experience, and eventually relocated to the Upper East Side’s Museum Mile. While these changes allowed the museum to increase revenue and attract new supporters, it also resulted in significant pushback from community members, who noted that the many changes had decreased opportunities for local Puerto Rican artists at the museum. Pressure to undertake mainstream model expansion resulted in a museum that, while successful by capitalist markers, failed to stay true to its original vision.

El Museo del Barrio’s Three Kings Day Parade, 2016 (source)

We can also use the four visions to help us understand the ramifications of new policy ideas intended to advance cultural equity. One proposal that has come up from time to time is to tie funding levels directly to the diversity of organizations. While many private funders in the United States ask questions about staff and board diversity and incorporate such information into funding decisions informally, the most assertive stands on this front are currently being staked out by other countries. In December 2014, Arts Council England announced that it would hold organizations accountable for promoting and developing diversity throughout their work across leadership, workforce, programming and audiences–or risk the loss of critical ACE funding. Meanwhile, the Canada Council for the Arts will now reduce funding for organizations that do not share a “commitment to reflecting the diversity of [their] geographic community or region.”

What reactions could we expect if the National Endowment for the Arts proposed to weigh diversity equally against its current review criteria of artistic excellence and artistic merit? Certainly, the Prosperity and Redistribution visions would see much to celebrate in such a proposal, given the increased access to different forms of capital it would represent. Supporters of the status quo, naturally, would resist. Perhaps the most interesting question is how such a policy move would sit with Self-Determination. While ostensibly a step in the direction of justice and thus unlikely to be opposed, it could be seen as giving too much emphasis to the goals of Diversity at the expense of broader social change. To maintain funding levels, mainstream institutions could shake up the composition of their staffs and boards, but the arts activities that take place through small organizations, churches, and informal collectives outside of the NEA’s reach might not realize much benefit. Moreover, the move would still leave control of resources firmly within the dominant system–resources that could disappear as soon as priorities shift, as has happened historically with NEA and state government funding.

Cultural Equity in a Healthy Arts Ecosystem

“Change is not a uniform process…the goal of building participation in the arts requires that leaders and organizations rethink the meaning of success.”

– Diane Grams and Betty Farrell, writing in Entering Cultural Communities, 2008

Createquity’s own vision of success is that every opportunity is taken to make people’s lives better through the arts. Clearly, in order to understand how to do that, we need to make sense of cultural equity in the context of our own work. Although this project started out as an investigation of the history of cultural equity activism, we soon realized we would provide more value both to ourselves and the field if we made an attempt to untangle the unnamed assumptions that so often confuse or complicate conversations about cultural equity.

As a first step, we set ourselves the task of writing arguments in favor of each of the four visions articulated above in the context of Createquity’s definition of a healthy arts ecosystem, in which each individual (now and in the future) has the opportunity to participate in the arts at a level suited to that person’s interest and skill. Because Createquity has identified specific outcomes that we believe characterize a healthy arts ecosystem, many of these arguments diverge a bit from the language that activists use (e.g., “institutions rooted in communities of color will hire more artists of color than mainstream institutions would and pay them a market wage, thus distributing very scarce opportunities to participate in the arts more equitably”). However, we tried our best throughout the exercise to make an authentic translation between each of the visions and our own.

Next, we took the arguments for each of the visions and attempted to articulate the fact-based assumptions undergirding each of them, staying as close to the healthy arts ecosystem definition as possible. (You can see these assumptions in the same document linked above.) To establish a preliminary sense of where we were as an organization, we asked our editorial team to rate each of the resulting fifty-odd assumptions on a scale of one (“I am very confident this is not true”) to five (“I am very confident this is true.”) The assumptions were presented at face value, without the context of a vision, and in no particular order. Ten Createquity team members participated.

In developing these arguments and assumptions, we wanted to acknowledge that one reason why cultural equity initiatives fall short is because they often face resistance from parties who argue against any change to the status quo. As a thought exercise, we included “Status Quo” as a fifth vision for success, developing as many arguments in its favor as we could think of. While Status Quo arguments in practice often take an institution- or discipline-centric frame that is at odds with Createquity’s concern for the entire ecosystem, we did manage to come up with a few rationales that could be consistent with the idea of making people’s lives better through the arts. For example, one could argue that mainstream institutions are crucial to artistic professions where it is difficult, though possible, to make a living as an artist (such as ballet dancer or orchestra musician). Perhaps it is the case that the Eurocentric programming presented by mainstream institutions is inherently expensive to produce, and thus it is natural and expected for institutions that offer this programming to receive a disproportionate amount of subsidy. Status Quo advocates frequently seek to avoid setting up the choice between maintaining subsidy or supporting smaller organizations as an either/or; they argue that mainstream institutions deliver a lot of benefits to their communities by operating at scale, which allows them to serve many more people and–importantly–to bring in tourism dollars. They may also argue that most donors to mainstream arts organizations would not have considered contributing to smaller organizations anyway.

“Museum Mile” by flickr user MichelinStar

On the whole, our team did not find the assumptions underlying the pro-Status Quo arguments particularly compelling, with one exception: we agreed that mainstream institutions could likely serve as an anchor for tourism, regardless of efforts to diversify. The remaining ratings did not yield an unambiguous endorsement of any vision in particular. That said, the following assumptions received high ratings across the board, and we presently consider these to be our “working assumptions” in the context of our work on cultural equity:

• At a basic level, we agree that mainstream institutions grew out of a white, racist system, and continue to disproportionately serve white people and certain other demographics.
• There is further agreement that funding disproportionately flows to these mainstream institutions.
• We agree that a lack of diverse cultural programming, either from mainstream institutions or those that receive some other form of validation from the broader culture, is problematic for the wellbeing of people of color.
• There is a general trust that people of color, whether in the context of mainstream institutions or institutions of color, will be more likely to provide programming opportunities to artists of color.
• And finally, there is agreement that many of the dominant organizing logics within the current nonprofit sector provide disproportionate control over individual institutions to those with wealth and influence.

It’s important to note that these are working assumptions, which means they could change in response to new information or data. But for now, the combination of these views means that Createquity sees the concentration of resources within mainstream institutions as likely problematic absent meaningful diversification of those institutions. It also offers an endorsement of involving more people of color in programming decisions, whether through mainstream institutions or some other means.

We are much less clear as a group on how resources should be optimally distributed than we are on the idea that the current arrangement is probably not for the best. That outcome is not terribly surprising; after all, little is known about many of the assumptions that distinguish the Diversity, Prosperity, Redistribution and Self-Determination visions from one another. We see this as a crucial opportunity for future research in the sector. In our own efforts, we plan to prioritize the following questions going forward:

VALUABLE CULTURAL EXPERIENCES
What are the ingredients of a cultural experience that people find valuable? Are those ingredients consistent across demographics? Are the demographics of the staff (artistic, programming, and administrative) and board at arts and cultural organizations predictive of a) the demographics of their participants and b) the quality of experience that participants have?

THE BENEFITS AND COSTS OF SCALE
What effect does the scale of an arts organization (or an organization with arts programming) have on its ability to create specific benefits for artists, audiences, and communities of color? How do networks of larger and smaller organizations perform relative to each other in facilitating these benefits? Does the influence of wealthy donors, funders, and customers tend to promote or harm an organization’s ability to deliver these benefits?

ARTS AND SOCIAL CHANGE
Are arts activities designed to combat racism and other forms of oppression effective in that goal? How do they compare to other anti-oppression strategies, and do they make those strategies more effective when used in combination?

In the United States, we have data showing the distribution of funding to different kinds of arts organizations, including those primarily serving communities of color. We have data on the demographics of arts audiences, of artists, and increasingly of the cultural workforce. And there’s more research on these topics being commissioned all the time. Isn’t that enough?

We would argue that it’s not. Knowledge of this nature can only ever establish that there might be a problem; it gives us very little insight on what we should do about it. We might each have intuitions about the right path forward, but as this article amply demonstrates, reasonable people are coming to different conclusions about where those paths lead. So long as that remains the case, we suspect the fight for cultural equity will continue to be a long, slow, uncertain slog.

At Createquity, we’ve embraced the framework of wellbeing–which groups the various components of individual and societal health under a single conceptual umbrella–as a way of binding together the outcomes of a healthy arts ecosystem holistically. While there are many ways of conceptualizing and measuring wellbeing, one of the most common involves simply asking people how satisfied they are with their lives–which sounds pretty self-determining to us. Pursuing future inquiry through a wellbeing or quality-of-life lens may be an effective tactic for building bridges between visions and the ideologies they represent, by enabling the relative value of components of each vision to be understood as part of an integrated whole. We can all agree, hopefully, that the goals of cultural equity are compatible with the goal of a happier and more meaningful life for all. We hope our work here can be one small step towards creating that better future.

A full bibliography for this piece as well as several endnotes can be found here. Createquity would like to thank Plural (Mina Matlon, Ingrid van Haastrecht, and Kaitlyn Wittig Mengüç), Andrea Louie, and Marc Vogl for their invaluable feedback in the course of developing this article.

Who will take care of these artist-citizens when they get sick or injured? Who will grow food and repair buildings? Who will mediate disputes? Perhaps in a radical shift toward interdisciplinary living, these functions will be considered new artforms. Perhaps the growth of artificial intelligence will, in fact, have rendered these functions obsolete, freeing people to focus on artistic pursuits if they wanted. In our 21st century reality, though, not everyone who envisions an arts career can follow through on that dream. The option to make one’s living as a pro artist is bestowed upon a small portion of the people who desire it.

Which begs the question: who should those people be?

Photo by Flickr user, hollyannephotog7

As we at Createquity perceive it, they should be the artists whose work offers the greatest benefit to others. That can mean engaging an unusually large audience. It can mean winning disproportionate respect from experts. It can mean adding something unique to the cultural diet of humanity. Or it can mean improving lives in other concrete and meaningful ways.

Those criteria should have little, if anything, to do with an artist’s family tax bracket. And yet we see troubling signs that socioeconomic status does correlate with access to a professional arts career. Logically, it makes sense: if an occupation is attractive but probably low-paying, and then there are socioeconomic inequalities in the road to becoming a professional, inevitably that line of work would beckon more people from affluent backgrounds.

Empirically, reliable data is hard to come by, but what we have found tends to support the suspicion. One U.K. study finds that artists there are predominantly middle class, and a U.S. report declared that average household income during the childhood of artists (in 1979) was the same as those who went on to become chief executives, general managers, and engineers—above the 60th percentile of family income. Our own analysis of the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts via the National Archive of Data on Arts & Culture reveals that professionals in “Arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations” were about 60% more likely than average to have a father who attended at least some college (55.9% vs. 34.5%), and 70% more likely to have a mother who attended college (55.9% vs. 32.6%). That is the most extreme skew of any of 23 occupation categories for mother’s education; for fathers, it’s exceeded only by mathematics and computer science occupations.

Artist by Flickr user, Esther Simpson

What’s behind these trends? Last month, our article on The BFA’s Dance with Inequality explored whether the cost of an arts agree poses a barrier to individuals in the U.S. from financially disadvantaged backgrounds who may otherwise wish to pursue a career in the arts. The short answer is that it doesn’t – in fact, the vast majority of working artists in this country do not have arts degrees, although the importance of such a credential to an arts career does vary widely by artistic discipline and goals.

What about risk? Could poorer individuals be shying away from becoming artists because of what might happen if it doesn’t work out? Are the risks associated with an arts career disproportionately discouraging to economically disadvantaged individuals? Are there other sectors we can learn from?

Here’s what we do know about pursuing a career in the arts.

• The notion of “the day job” is very real. Artists tend to have other work to draw from to earn income. The day-job phenomenon is especially true for artists who support single-income households. For example, Australian artists who don’t rely on the income from a partner spend more time on non-arts work.

• Many artists are making backup plans. Although artists are possibly go-getters by getting out into the field sooner than other professionals (with fewer total years of education), nearly half of them in the U.S., according to BFAMFAPhD’s “Artists Report Back,” built a safety net by majoring in another subject. Arts students also pick up more minors and teaching certificates as part of their “backup” planning – one way to try to minimize the risk inherent in their choices.

• The artist’s path is fraught with risk. The professional arts career has a long gestation period with high opportunity costs. Artists face greater variability in their earnings than those working in other fields and are five times more likely to be self-employed. Some have hypothesized that this nature of the arts draws more risk-seeking individuals than the general labor market.

Inequality Across Sister Sectors

In many ways, artists have a lot in common with tech entrepreneurs. The early (and sometimes not so early) stages of their careers could be likened to the startup phase of companies, in which Mark Zuckerberg hopefuls pull ramen-fueled all-nighters for uncertain, uneven remuneration. Working artists interact with labor markets in ways that could be compared to small firms. The two fields have common controversies: for tech entrepreneurs the necessity of a college degree has likewise been called into question. There’s even a debt-free, direct path for emerging tech stars from all types of socioeconomic backgrounds. A prime example is the Thiel Fellowship; following in the footsteps of other dropouts such as Bill Gates, young tech entrepreneurs are receiving $100,000 if they leave or put off college to pursue their own Thiel projects.

Photo by ThielFellowship.org as well as LinkedIn user, Mike Olson

Unfortunately, in both fields, the risks involved in developing a career seemingly correlate with the underrepresentation of low-SES professionals. According to one U.S. survey, entrepreneurs skew toward affluence; by another account, tech entrepreneurs come mostly from middle-class backgrounds. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that “more than 80% of funding for new enterprises comes from personal savings, family and friends.”

We don’t know whether tech entrepreneurs try to mitigate the risks of their careers, but it seems like artists do. A question lingers: if artists can and do create backup plans and hold day jobs to lower their personal risk, how do we explain why aren’t there more low-SES professional artists? Perhaps it’s related to social and human capital. In order to be successful, artists need to be able to commit uncompensated time to a passion project, particularly over an extended period. They need to spend thousands of hours in training/practice, which are thousands of hours that they’re not earning a living.

No matter what entrepreneurial capacities we teach, push and support to prepare emerging artists for this uncertain economy, a person’s financial circumstances could matter quite a bit. Resources depend, at least partly, on a stable asset base, and the limited resources of low-SES populations might impact their ability to grow their new businesses and arts careers, demanding greater risk-taking. The National Bureau of Economic Research recently provided indications that risk tolerance relates much more to circumstances (behavior in relationship to environment) than to personality, pointing to evidence that individuals from poorer backgrounds have lower risk tolerance.

Risking It All, for What?

Like tech entrepreneurship, the arts are among the world’s “winner-take-all” industries; with the exception of a handful of superstars, most of the pack will struggle mightily toward public acclaim and financial stability. The risk artists face, though, is on another level: even when successful in establishing a career at all, they experience the biggest drop between income during childhood and income during adulthood among the 31 careers in the National Longitudinal Survey. Researcher Pierre-Michel Menger reports in the 1999 Annual Review of Sociology that “the skewed distribution of artists income is strongly biased to the lower end of the range.” In Canada, arts managers, directors, coordinators and government cultural workers have higher and rising salaries compared to the art-makers themselves, who in the U.S. are more likely than non-artist and technical professionals to live below the poverty line (6.9 percent vs. 4.2 percent according to data from the 2000 US Census).

Is it just the dream of fame and fortune that compels aspiring artists to take such gambles? Or is it expression and societal contribution? Financial benefit, interestingly, does not appear to be much of a motivator for good work. According to Menger, professional artists feel “zero or negative correlation between effort and earnings.” In a recent London study of cultural industry professionals, 88% reported that they have worked for free; individuals from low-SES backgrounds may not always have that luxury. Indeed, risk aversion might be a reason less affluent individuals in the United Kingdom are more likely to participate in the arts informally.

Photo by Flickr user, Samira

Looking Ahead

While we have yet to find solid evidence that risk dissuades individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds from pursuing arts careers, we know that if the arts and entrepreneurship remain enclaves for the privileged, we will all be the poorer for it. As much as our cultural and technological palettes have been enhanced by the likes of Nina Simone, Mark Rothko, Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, and Hamilton‘s Anthony Ramos, they shouldn’t be the exception that proves the rule.

One potentially promising area of investigation would be to examine alternate systems that could better support such professionals by decoupling success from an inequitable distribution of risk. Do we need more targeted support for less affluent artists? Germany, France, and Holland have been experimenting with social welfare programs for artists. The government of Sweden is offering lifetime pensions. With a more equitable socioeconomic grounding, the issue of risk for artists (as well as for tech entrepreneurs) might become moot. In our final article of this current series, we’ll explore that topic in greater depth.

In the latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists. 

Cover image: “Semana Alagoana de Hip Hop,” courtesy of Coletivo Popfuzz via Flickr Creative Commons license. 

In the past fifteen years, the number of nonprofit theater companies in the United States has doubled while audiences and funding have shrunk. Neither the field nor the next generation of artists is served by this unexamined multiplication…There has been tremendous collective buy-in to what has become a fossilized model.

—Rebecca Novick, theater director and arts consultant

Then hear out Voice 2:

We communities of color are still trying to understand the mainstream nonprofit culture, with all its unwritten rules and regulations. We are trying to be better nonprofit players. We have to, because the game is not going to change any time soon, and those communities who don’t know the rules or who don’t practice enough are left behind… We have no choice.

—Vu Le, executive director of Rainier Valley Corps

Stop and reflect on Voice 3:

I’ve always been a bit uncomfortable with our sector’s be-all-and-end-all focus on the needs of the nonprofit arts… The sector has grown bigger without getting richer.

—Bill Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts

See if you agree with Voice 4:

Funding organizations really do roll their eyes these days, when yet another nonprofit, pops up with its hands out. Reality: no one is gonna pay your tab.

—Misha Penton, opera singer, theater artist, and artistic director of Divergence Vocal Theater

Opinions about the nonprofit arts model—the fundamental legal and business structure in which arts nonprofits in the United States work—are as numerous and varied as 501(c)(3)s themselves. But one thing all of these quotes take for granted is the existence of the model itself. While that system may seem “fossilized” to some, the truth is that most arts nonprofits today are younger than most of our parents. The boom of arts nonprofits has been a relatively recent phenomenon, and it came about thanks in large part to a handful of individuals who intentionally put it into motion.

Graphic by Shawn Lent and Katherine Ingersoll for Createquity. See endnotes for additional detail on sourcing.

The story of the nonprofit model is part of the broader heritage of nonprofits, and follows a similar trajectory. A combination of intentional interventions and societal factors led to a massive expansion of the nonprofit sector in the United States in the middle of the 20th century, both in terms of size and portion of overall economic activity. Nonprofit expenses and assets actually outpaced the economy between 1994 and 2004 primarily thanks to the growth of hospitals, health organizations and private colleges. In 2012, there was 1 nonprofit for every 175 Americans.

Despite such a boom, life inside the current arts ecosystem is not all it could be. Createquity’s mission is to identify the most important issues in the arts and what we can do about them, but a crucial barrier to executing on that premise is the sector’s limited capacity to create change. While the 501(c)(3) arts model offers infrastructure that, in theory, combines artistic aspiration with public accountability, the decentralization and limited scope of government policy make large-scale, systemic change in the sector difficult to accomplish. Yet Createquity’s long-range goal is to do exactly that, or at the very least to catalyze it.

One of the things that I pray for is that people with power will get good sense, and that people with good sense will get power…

—Dixie Carter as Julia Sugarbaker

To accurately predict how change can happen in the arts ecosystem, it would help to understand how change has already taken place in our arts 501(c)(3) genealogy. Specifically, we want to know whether individuals or organizations can truly and intentionally marshal change, or if a cloudy mix of circumstances is responsible for where we are today. Has transformation in the arts sector historically been calculated and choreographed, or organic and inadvertent?

It turns out that a narrow time period starting in the mid-1950s and ending in the late 1970s presents clear examples of deliberate and broad action, precipitating one of the most extensive changes in the arts ecosystem: the spread and embrace of the nonprofit model as a mechanism for cultivating and promoting the arts and culture within the United States.

But first, some time travel is in order.

THE ARTS ECOSYSTEM’S EARLY DAYS

The modern tax code, including the arts 501(c)(3) status we know today, was established in 1954, but its roots stretch back much farther. Several of our nation’s first theaters and museums were built before the American Revolution, but voluntary associations in this colonial period (as well as in the freshly independent years following the war) were limited by the strong role of the church and emboldened by the lack of federal authority over them. The landmark 1819 Supreme Court decision of Trustees of Dartmouth College vs. Woodward further constrained the government’s power to intervene in private charitable organizations and set protection for incorporated endowments, including the few for arts institutions.

From the Met to the Hull House, arts participation in 19th century America was shaped by class division. Urban wealthy elites, their formal governing sway slipping away in a democratic society, established private organizations to advance the greater good—and to preserve their class status. In the wake of civil war and the arrival of nearly 12 million immigrants, Americans formed mutual aid societies and unions, but also private schools, libraries, social clubs, and a scattering of non-commercial museums and symphony orchestras.

Donations from wealthy individuals were the most important source of support, and policymakers in the late 1800s introduced the country’s first statutory references and implementation of tax exemption for charitable organizations. In 1889, a certain Mr. Andrew Carnegie published “Wealth,” an essay pressing other tycoons to join him in donating considerable percentages of their fortunes for the good of society, including the arts and humanities. Years later, historians would credit Carnegie with conceptualizing what is now the modern philanthropic foundation.

“The Immigrants,” by Luis Sanguino in Battery Park – photo by flickr user k31thw

Even so, through the rip-roaring early part of the 20th century, the dominant vehicle for performing arts enterprises, from jazz clubs to theater ensembles, was the commercial sole proprietorship. As the socioeconomic gap became a socioeconomic crater, philanthropic support for arts nonprofits remained limited and highly localized. Coming out of the Great Depression and WWII, national foundations like Carnegie’s were primarily setting their sights on educational goals.

All the while, countless early arts pioneers, renegades, and boat rockers had the ambition to innovate on the local level, and many eventually saw the fruits of their efforts spread to varying degrees. But it wasn’t until the middle of the 20th century that the stage was set for sweeping transformation for the arts at the national level.

A MAN ON A MISSION

There are people who more than others constantly see themselves between past and future, …both in their own lives and in the history of mankind. And I’m one of those persons.

—W. McNeil Lowry

In the early 1950s, an executive named William McPeak participated in a study group for the Ford Foundation, which was exploring potential new structures and priorities as it prepared to become the largest foundation in the world. McPeak was pushing Ford to include the humanities in its vision for the future. One of his confidants during that struggle was W. McNeil “Mac” Lowry, a civilian journalist with the Washington bureau of Cox Newspapers who had been McPeak’s colleague at the Office of Wartime Information. Ford ultimately decided against funding the humanities when it expanded its scope from serving Detroit to focusing on social justice nationally and internationally, moving its office to New York City, but McPeak was hired as Ford’s Associate Director in 1953 and he brought Lowry on board as his assistant.

Two years into his tenure, Lowry was promoted to Program Director for Education and started suggesting ad hoc humanities grants under this education arm. They were small and few, and they were accepted. He also began writing policy papers and advocating internally for the creation of a large, full-fledged arts and humanities funding arm. This proposal was bold and unprecedented for any foundation at the time. With persistence and McPeak’s partnership, a mere four years after joining the foundation, Lowry was named director of its newly minted Division of Humanities and the Arts.

Lowry aimed to leverage Ford’s dollars and influence toward a grand vision of a robust arts field across the United States, but he started with a more tangible and comprehensible project: an inventory of the field conducted through interviews with artists and arts stakeholders, which would subsequently inform the decision on the part of Ford’s trustees whether to make the program permanent.

ripple effect – photo by flickr user Judy van der Velden

Lowry knew that his audience didn’t initially take his project very seriously. But as his assistant Marcia Thompson put it, it quickly became clear that the trustees “were not only entertained but were enormously interested in the field.” Lowry later said of his thinking,

It was not any secret to me what the little start of that program in 1957 might mean on a national basis… It’s just, you couldn’t divulge it because it was still dream and plan… This work is… a little bit like casting a stone in a puddle, but precisely which stone and precisely which puddle and for precisely which effect [is] the real creative part of it.

He and Thompson began by giving themselves the task of creating a directory with the names and contact information of every art critic and artist they could find around the country. Long before digital spreadsheets or the Internet, this was a hefty self-assignment. A former journalist with a history of telling it like it is, Lowry was willing to question loyalties and cliques. For example, he worked to extend professional arts opportunities outside major metropolitan areas even though several Ford trustees with connections to prominent New York institutions pushed back. He, along with associate director Edward F. D’Arms, traveled the country to speak with artists and stakeholders at over 175 arts companies. Lowry’s was a personal approach which gave him strong buy-in and trust from people who were actually engaged in arts work; he preferred direct correspondence with prospective grantees, including the likes of James Baldwin and Tom Stoppard. Lowry synthesized this mountain of data with more formal knowledge from economics and policy to begin to design the functions of Ford’s arts program.

Columbus, Ohio’s State Capitol from the Air (1957) – photo by flickr user Sent from the Past

Choosing to start with theater as his first arts discipline, Lowry used his new directory to send out a wide call for proposals, looking for groups (many of which were either sole proprietorships or amateur projects at the time) that seemed ready for the next step in professionalization. The focus was on smaller organizations outside the big cities because he did not want to see “money that could go to artists and artistic directors or to their outlets put in bricks and mortar.” With an investment of $9 million in 1961, the Ford Foundation had gathered steam for what would become the regional theater movement. After seven years of commercial operation, Zelda Fichandler transformed DC’s Arena Stage into one of the country’s first nonprofit theaters, primarily to receive a grant from the Ford Foundation.

One of Lowry’s primary aims was to increase the amount of professional performing arts activity in the country, but he wanted to be inclusive whenever possible. He had intended to fund a black theater when he launched the program in 1957 but was unable to locate a promising black artistic director able to get a new theater up and running. A couple years after Martin Luther King Jr. inspired the country with his dream of integration, a playwright named Douglas Turner Ward wrote an editorial in the New York Times about the need for a black theater, supporting disenfranchised artists, managers, writers, and designers. Lowry read the article and contacted Ward immediately. Shortly after, with a Ford grant of $434,000 ($3.3 million in 2016 dollars), Ward, producer/actor Robert Hooks and theater manager Gerald Krone would establish the Negro Ensemble Theatre Company in 1965.

Lowry got artists out of their comfort zones and towards professionalization, and was well aware of the consequences of him doing so. As he describes it,

[artistic producers] had to think about ‘where does this move us to the next phase?’…They took on costly activities that they had ignored before…. So they were stretched. And some of them were even shrewd enough to say in advance of a grant, ‘You’re going to stretch me, aren’t you?’ I’d say, ‘Yes, I’m sorry, that’s an inevitable consequence of this.’”

Under his direction, arts grants now required matching dollars for the first time and arts grantees were pushed to improve their marketing practices. For example, he directly supported Danny Newman, the press agent at Chicago Lyric Opera, to evangelize the subscription model to performing arts organizations across the country.

Lowry’s legacy also stretched entire segments of the performing arts. During his tenure, Ford invested $19.5 million to help build 17 resident professional theaters between 1962 and 1976, and was the first American foundation to fund dance on a large scale ($22.5 million from 1957-1973). Ford’s largest arts investment over this time was the Symphony Orchestra Program ($80.2 million). Lowry retired from his position as Vice President at Ford in 1974, and passed away in 1993.

Mac Lowry could easily be labeled one of the nonprofit arts sector’s most significant figures of all time. No exaggeration. Lincoln Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, described Lowry as “the single most influential patron of the performing arts that the American democratic system has produced.” By changing the financial incentives for artists, he directly helped to create an entire field of professional, nonprofit performing arts institutions. Thanks to Lowry, Ford became not only the first foundation to fund arts institutions on a large scale (making $249.8 million worth of arts grants 1957-1973, or nearly $2 billion in today’s dollars), but also the largest nongovernmental funder of the nonprofit performing arts.

In this position, the Ford Foundation was able to exert considerable influence on the sector. Bill Ivey notes that “the ‘Ford model’ remains the gold standard shaping intervention in America’s arts system.” Decades later, Ford is 5th on a list of the top 25 arts funders, which underscores how the number of foundations interested in the arts has grown over time, and the strength of Lowry’s legacy in philanthropy.

At the Ford Foundation, Lowry had been given wide latitude to try new things, with a significant amount of money. His success had always been boosted by internal support from McPeak, but in 1966 Ford welcomed one of its more liberal presidents, McGeorge Bundy, who came to Ford from the Johnson administration and his “Great Society” programs. Under Bundy’s leadership, Ford was an instigator of public-private philanthropy and Lowry was able to connect to the subsidy argument of federal support for the arts. Lowry later reflected that “a pervasive effect of the Ford program was the enlightenment that began to spread not only about the importance of nonprofit artistic enterprises, but more precisely their justification for subsidy.”

Lowry and his colleagues were able to ride a wave of public support and concern while acknowledging and working with, not against, broader political agendas. To Createquity, this insight seems critical to understanding why monumental change could take place when it did, and it raises the question of how such transformation could be possible in our current polarized political climate.

THREE ARTS PRESIDENTS AND A NANCY

With standoffs with Vladimir Putin and strikes at orchestras, theaters and beyond dominating modern newsfeeds, it is difficult to imagine a contemporary POTUS declaring the arts as a diplomatic weapon against Russia or sending the Secretary of Labor to personally mediate a dispute between a major arts institution and its workers. Yet in the late 1950s and early 1960s, that is exactly what happened.

As Lowry’s influence at Ford evolved, so did the operative role of the federal government in the arts. President Eisenhower, a Republican, advocated in his 1955 State of the Union address for the establishment of a Federal Advisory Commission on the Arts. This was cultural cold war: as one artistic director put it, “Eisenhower spoke of a lack of achievement in the cultural sphere: Who did we have to export in terms of ballet, opera and theatre companies? How could we compete with Russia, which had such a rich cultural spectrum of performing arts?”

Bolshoi Ballet Theatre in Moscow – photo by flickr user appaIoosa

Although Eisenhower was all talk and little action on the arts and no formal advisory body was created during his two terms, he did have one major accomplishment: the passing of the National Cultural Center Act of Congress in 1958, which would set the stage for the founding of a certain, prominent national performing arts center on the Potomac River thirteen years later.

Two years later, John F. Kennedy won the election with a party platform that included a brief mention of “a federal advisory agency to assist in the evaluation, development, and expansion of cultural resources.” Although he didn’t have a cultural agenda, the Kennedy Administration would be the one to finally elevate cultural policy to a national priority.

During his first year as President, Kennedy had the White House taking direct action in the arts. When the American Federation of Musicians Local 802 led a strike against The Metropolitan Opera during his first year in office, Kennedy sent Secretary of Labor Arthur Goldberg to arbitrate the salary dispute that had halted the current production season. While serving as the mediator in his office, Goldberg suggested that government funds be used to help settle the Met’s $840,000 debt (that would be more than $6.6 million federal dollars today used to bail out a private arts institution); it’s a safe bet today’s Congress would not get behind that.

Possibly influenced by Jacqueline Kennedy’s love for the arts, President Kennedy expanded his public support, saying, “The life of the arts, far from being an interruption, a distraction, in the life of a nation, is very close to the center of a nation’s purpose . . . and is a test of the quality of a nation’s civilization.” In contrast to Eisenhower’s cold war logic, Kennedy’s policy vision would position arts and culture as sources of national hope and solidarity, continuing to push toward both a national center and a federal agency for arts and culture.

President Kennedy was active in the arts right up until his shocking murder in Dallas. In 1963 alone, he emphasized the importance of national recognition of the arts in a speech at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College; established the Advisory Council on the Arts (not appointed until after his death); and commissioned a report by August Heckscher, director of the Twentieth Century Fund and his special consultant for the arts, on the relationship between the arts and the Federal government.

Together, these resources laid the foundation for the ultimate achievement in linking federal government to arts and culture, the signing of the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities into law in 1965 by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Johnson chose Roger Lacey Stevens, a Broadway producer who had led the fundraising efforts for the National Cultural Center (later renamed The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), as the NEA’s first Chairman and Special Assistant on the Arts.

NEH Chairman William Adams tours the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library exhibits – photo by the LBJ Foundation on flickr

Following Stevens’s brief inaugural tenure as NEA Chairman, Nancy Hanks (not the mother of the 16th President of the United States, for whom she is descended and named), was selected to head the search for his successor. After several prominent figures had turned the position down, Hanks herself was appointed by President Nixon in 1969; according to Stevens, “they were looking for some women for jobs.” She was a Southern Republican and a Duke University graduate who began her career as a DC receptionist and later gained White House experience as assistant to Nelson A. Rockefeller and his arts programs. Afterward, while on staff at The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Hanks published the influential report, The Performing Arts: Problems & Prospects (1965). By the end of the 1960s, she had both been named president of the Associated Council on the Arts (ACA) and diagnosed with cancer. She chose to remain unmarried and without children; she would later be deemed the mother of a million artists.

Amidst the burgeoning feminist movement, Hanks took the reins of a then-nascent NEA with grander aims for the agency. In her first six weeks at the helm of the NEA, she personally spoke to 200 Congressmen to advocate for her proposal to double the budget and to secure future appropriations for the nation’s bicentennial, which was more than six years ahead. Hanks was a sagacious power; her office became a lobbying machine.

She battled her cancer quietly while strongarming Congress, protecting NEA political territory, and preempting controversies for the agency. In 1970, when the NEA budget faced the ax, Hanks and her assistant individually cornered over 100 Congressmen and succeeded in swaying their votes. Julia Butler Hansen, a Democrat from Washington State and chairwoman of the House appropriations subcommittee during that term, said she needed to see letters from constituents to be convinced, so Hanks somehow got a form letter onto every theater seat in the country and, within a few weeks, had thousands of them into Hansen’s mailbox. When artists won prestigious prizes, Hanks would send out letters to the Representatives of their home states, reminding them that “good artists do not just happen.”

Hanks put a large emphasis on grants to institutions, which helped to make arts funding a bipartisan issue since many wealthy board members of symphonies and museums were Republicans like her. The concept of public subsidy for the arts was sold as a cure for the “cost disease” endemic to nonprofit arts organizations. Revenue and private donations alone could not support the sector, she believed; the income gap must be filled.

With an art-for-all-Americans ethos, Hanks supported a plentitude of smaller nonprofit arts organizations in newly funded areas such as crafts. Additionally, Hanks played an instrumental role in establishing the Arts Council of Americas to unite the more than 50 community arts councils already in existence and in expanding the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies in order to have a well-funded state council in every state and territory in the U.S. Much of the NEA’s funding was designated to run through these state councils.

Later in her tenure Hanks authorized the NEA Challenge Grants, which demanded matching contributions to leverage investment from the private sector. This was a strategy similar to those of the Ford Foundation in the 1960s and the Johnson Administration’s War on Poverty.

Before Hanks, the NEA was more of a figurehead organization with a modest budget; by 1976, it was the largest institutional funder of the arts in the country. In brief, she was the savviest operator in the NEA’s history. She served two terms as the NEA chair until her resignation in 1977, and she died of her cancer six years later at age 55. A mere three weeks after her passing, President Reagan (whose economic policies were threatening the existence of the NEA and NEH at the time) signed a law renaming NEA and NEH’s erstwhile home, the Old Post Office, in Washington, D.C. the Nancy Hanks Center.

Go to Theatre Week, 1922 – photo by Washington State Library

HOW LOWRY AND HANKS CHANGED THE ARTS NONPROFIT SECTOR FOREVER

Neither Lowry nor Hanks saw themselves as artists (Hanks said her only art form was “needlepoint typewriter covers”; others said that it clearly persuasion), yet both were passionate in building towards a new arts vision for America, supporting and connecting artists nationwide. They were willing to defy the expectations and design of their jobs in order to create financial and structural support for artists. Both traveled the country for the cause; Lowry to discover promising artistic directors, and Hanks to advocate on their behalf.

Their combined legacy was to establish the current shape of the nonprofit arts sector and its mechanisms of funding. Importantly, both the Ford Foundation and the federal government brought vast new resources to the arts funding table, and directed those resources almost exclusively to nonprofit arts organizations. In doing so, not only did Lowry and Hanks catalyze the arts 501(c)(3) boom, they created the common practice of matching grants, the growth and coordination of local arts agencies, the use of grant panels, the rise of grantwriter-as-paid-employee in arts institution, and more. The influence of each can be seen in the geographic spread of infrastructure to support the arts across the country — regional theaters, dance companies, and symphony orchestras in Lowry’s case, and arts councils in Hanks’s.

They engineered the initial professionalization of the field. Publications and conferences, like those of the Theatre Communications Group which Lowry first convened, declared and disseminated best practices. The effect of these deliberate acts was characteristic of the organizational ecology concept of “legitimation”: as a particular type of organization becomes more accepted, it is established more and more frequently. By the mid-1970s, the nonprofit was set as the expected and dominant legal structure for new arts organizations.

We approached this research wanting to learn how change happens; we didn’t intend to dwell on whether the change has been good or bad. That said, there are several aspects of the arts ecosystem in America today that seem to have been shaped by from the transformation fostered by Lowry, Hanks, Kennedy, and others in the middle of the 20th century.

There is more, more, more

The timing of the boom differed by discipline, but all disciplines saw sustained growth when they began to embrace the nonprofit structure. Overall, despite government funding cuts, Reaganomics and the culture wars, the leveling of private funding, and periodic recessions since the 1980-90s, the number of arts nonprofit organizations has shown continued, though slowing, growth.

What does that growth tell us about the number of people being served by these organizations, or about the amount of art available in general? We know that as the nonprofit arts sector grows it employs more individuals; however, it is unclear whether more artists are getting paid to make art, or if there are more opportunities for artists to work as administrators, or whether more money is going to hire arts managers and educators.

Did the increase in the number of arts organizations contribute to higher levels of arts attendance? Several reports show increased activity in certain disciplines during the 1960-1980s, but it is unclear whether the number of arts products/activities actually increased, or if it was just that more arts experiences were made professional or formal in ways that allowed them to be counted.

What we do know is that as the growth of the sector appears to have yielded more opportunities and inclination for people to experience the arts. For example, there have been rising rates of spending on arts experiences in relation to total leisure spending, which can be attributed to the fact that increased institutional grant support opened up new markets.

Opportunities for (nonprofit) arts participation are available across the country

Before Lowry and Hanks, almost all professional performing arts companies were in New York City and other metropolitan hubs on the East Coast, but the geographic spread of institutional funding starting in the 1960s has supplied arts, especially performing arts, outside of major metropolises into towns where the arts are not as commercially viable. During Hanks’s tenure, NEA grants found their way into all 50 states and six U.S. territories. Analysis by the NEA performed in both 1982 and 1992 on the division between nonprofit and commercial performing arts companies showed that nonprofit organizations represented higher percentages of the sector in areas that were not centers for commercial performance.

American art is now much more than Eurocentric symphonies, museums and theaters

The notion that we should remove barriers to access of the arts is now widely accepted and seems to be a legacy of Hanks’s ethos. During the 1970s-1990s, the boomers worked to democratize the arts: careers, patronage and participation. The sector’s expansion started in the professional performing arts but then grew to support a broader range of genres and disciplines, and it’s likely that this has made a stronger mix of cultural products available to society today. Although Lowry’s early efforts were focused on professional theater, music, and dance, once the funding infrastructure was in place and the category of nonprofit arts was established, the momentum provided by the new structures and incentives fostered demands to support other artistic disciplines, and, later, the inclusion of a broader range of artistic endeavors.

“Heard” by Nick Cave, Grand Central Terminal, March 2013 – photo by flickr user j-No

The U.S. arts ecosystem is still striving for equity

Although more resources are available to support cultural activity since before the nonprofit arts sector boom, the nonprofit system seems to have benefited European cultural traditions more than others, and white artists more than artists of color. It has legitimately been observed that arts genres that have been accepted as high culture for longer periods have adopted the nonprofit form in greater numbers, whereas cultural forms that have more recently come to be seen as important have been more likely to be commercial. In 1979, only 4% of NEA grant funds were going to black arts organizations, almost exclusively through its Expansion Arts initiative. In 1994, Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, was appalled to realize that “for 135 years after the founding of the federal art collections in 1829, no work by a black American was represented in the nation’s holdings.”

It seems that movement toward true equity in the nonprofit arts sector has been weak, slow, incomplete, or put in the hands of large institutions as part a community engagement trickle-down scenario. Issues of equity in funding, leadership and audiences by race, gender, disability, etc. have manifested differently in different disciplines, but important questions linger on whether the growth of the nonprofit sector has brought with it a growth of inequality.

WHERE WE GO FROM HERE

The story of Lowry and Hanks is the story of the establishment. They were two individuals who, welcomed into institutions of wealth, power, and (white privilege), adroitly navigated those spaces in a mission to do good across the arts sector. Yet as more and more arts nonprofits sprung up over generations, the metrics they established spread like a gospel of the arts, not recognizing the full array of cultural expression people were already employing. It seems safe to assume that white cultural traditions were more robustly promoted and supported by Lowry, Hanks and their allies, which is why it is important to note other schismatics who were integral to further developing and supporting the arts, to problematizing the relationship between nonprofit and commercial artmaking, to diversifying access and opportunity in the field, to utilizing technology, and to increasing popularity and new audiences for the arts. Influencers and moments of change like these will be explored in upcoming Createquity features.

Many of the sector’s successes, as well as its intractable issues, stem from the dominance of the nonprofit arts model which was driven by those formative actions in the 1950s-1960s. Lowry and his peers deliberately sought to create a healthier arts ecosystem by strengthening and professionalizing arts institutions. Yet the question is worth asking whether most institutions, thus professionalized, tend to prioritize their own preservation. Createquity’s definition of a healthy arts ecosystem asserts that “To the extent that any element within the infrastructure is unwilling or unable to put the goal of improving people’s lives in concrete and meaningful ways first, it’s acting as a drag on the system’s capacity to change for the better. We see this problem manifesting in a number of ways, including the reluctance of cultural institutions to prioritize the interests of the ecosystem as a whole ahead of their own prosperity…” Will future changemakers be the ones who, like Lowry, are able to prioritize the entire arts ecosystem over their own institutions?

This is just the first of many articles on the capacity to create change in the arts ecosystem. We invite you to get involved in this journey by joining us for a #CreatequityAsks Twitter chat on how change happens on March 17th from 7:30-8:30pm Eastern.

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