In October the National Endowment for the Arts Quick Study podcast (transcript available) took a look at how arts participation broke down across the United States via data collected in 2022 by the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts.
What I found most interesting was how participation and attendance of different arts and cultural activities varied from state to state. While we might think of places like NYC as being a cultural center in the US, that isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, New York State’s numbers were lower than one might expect though NEA Director of Research and Analysis Sunil Iyengar partially attributed that to the fact there were still Covid restrictions on Broadway productions during 2022.
According to Iyengar,
…higher than average attendance was clocked by seven states. Utah, Vermont, Nebraska, North Dakota, Indiana, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Per capita, Washington DC also drew more arts participation than most states
Utah, Vermont, and Nebraska vastly outstripped the national average for attending at least one live performance. Massachusetts exceeded the national average for art museum attendance and Vermont and DC exceeded the national average for overall museum attendance.
Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Montana had higher levels of people attending stage plays or musicals (school based performances were not counted). South Dakotans attended dance in higher levels than the rest of the nation.
When it came to music, Massachusetts was on top for classical music, DC turned out for jazz, New Mexico was triple the US average for Latin, Spanish, and salsa concerts.
Iyengar said the survey didn’t drill down on every performing arts discipline and used some catch-all categories. Indiana topped attendance in that category.
“…types we do not ask about on the survey, these may have been rock or pop concerts, rap or hip hop, or even comedy shows, circuses, or magic shows. That’s a kind of lump all category. We find that 37% of Indiana residents went to one of these types of events in the last year compared to 21% of adults in general. In Michigan, another Midwestern state, the rate was also high, 34%. And out East in Delaware, it was 35%.
Of course, someone has to generate all that creative content and the survey measured that as well:
…the states that did particularly well in terms of arts creation were Wisconsin, Maine, Montana, Vermont, Nebraska, Utah, Oregon, Washington State and Ohio. All these states had above average shares of residents who personally created or performed art…. Wisconsin, where the rate of arts creation in the course of a year was 73%, versus 52% of the U.S. as a whole. Wisconsin had an especially strong showing with people doing dance, taking photographs for artistic purposes and making visual art in general. And Maine, where 71% of people made their own art, included a lot of folks working with textiles, weaving, crocheting, quilting or doing needlepoint, knitting or sewing.
The full report, 50 States of Arts Participation: 2022, can be found on the National Endowment for the Arts website. There is a quick drop down menu to show some highlights for each state, but the report does a much better job of providing specific detail.
One of the things I take from the survey is the suspicion that many people down really perceive themselves as participating in artistic and creative practice. When I see that Hawaii pretty significantly is below the national average for participation in social or artistic dancing and playing a musical instrument, it doesn’t correspond with my experience living there where everyone seemed to at least dabble a little in both if not regularly perform or take instruction.