Fund Artists, Not Organizations
Facing massive unemployment and an apparatus of white supremacy, President Roosevelt established federal agencies charged with employing Americans, including out-of-work artists. State-level support for indigent artists began in 1931, and the federal work relief programs were announced in August, 1935. By the time the last program shuttered in June 1943, Americans had been paid to make millions of murals, sculptures, paintings, posters, books, pamphlets, plays, musicals, radio programs, and songs.
The majority of the WPA funds were dispensed as individual grants or paychecks; only a minority went to arts organziations. While federal grants to non-profit arts organizations would only have provided support to highly skilled workers, this policy of individual subvention directed aid where it was desperately needed. The WPA sought to employ semi-skilled and unskilled laborers, making few distinctions between the arts, crafts, or creative professions. WPA workers included weavers and potters, doll- and toy-makers, folk musicians and storytellers — as well as fine artists. In choosing to support workers instead of organziations, the WPA projects significantly increased access to arts careers for millions of women, people of color, and Natives.
Equalizing access to artistic careers resulted in increased equality of representation — the histories, cultures, values, and experiences of non-elites were endorsed by the government, shown to the public, and increased in market value. At no time in history have Americans had as much access to diverse culture and art as they did in the late 1930s, as creators were freed from the “need to please commercial tastes and elite patrons.” Instead, artists were encouraged to engage with local or regional themes, histories, and locally available materials — WPA administrators argued that this regional diversity was a way to achieve national unity, and “therein lay America’s true richness and its full independence from Europe.” Author Ralph Ellison’s defense of the WPA Writers’ Project described their ambition succinctly: “we are creating American history; we are not reliving European or African history.”
We would be wise to acknowledge the lessons of the WPA programs. As the New York Times reported last week, New York City is facing its worst economy since the 1970s, and unemployment rates are estimated to be hovering around 20%. The employment emergency in the arts is even more severe. A recent study by Americans for the Arts found two of every three artists is unemployed, and 95% of them have experienced a drop in income — the average decline in estimated income is $24,000 — as reported by NPR.
Equality of access and equality of representation have not been achieved with our current policy of organizational subsidy. The New York arts workforce is still predominantly white (particularly if you exclude security, maintenance, and cleaning staff) and our collections include few non-white or female artists. This, despite decades-long efforts by activists like the Guerilla Girls, and Mayor DeBlasio’s now four-year-old pledge to diversify the city’s artistic workforce. Yet, grants to arts organizations remain the primary means by which American tax dollars support the arts, at least since the NEA ended the re-granting program in 1994.
While low tax investment and lip-service to diversity initiatives have failed to energize the arts, our daily creative lives are richer than ever. A report released this week by LaPlaca Cohen and Slover-Linett reveals that 81% of surveyed Americans have engaged their creativity during the pandemic — including cooking, painting, pottery, singing, and journaling. Yet, much of that work is made and consumed for free — only 13% of those surveyed by LaPlaca Cohen/Slover-Linett report paying for access to the digital content they consumed, 38% of which they received directly from an artist: labor without workers; labor without income.
America is presented with two challenges: providing impactful government subventions to stimulate the economy, and rebuilding our communities while dismantling white supremacy. The New Deal programs under President Roosevelt by no means eliminated white supremacy in the arts, but they do represent the most successful such effort in the history of the American republic.
In 2020, the arts need a program that supports individual workers, and places few constraints on the work, its medium, or content. To be sure, programs like these produce more artistic “failures” than hits. Photographer and arts administrator Alfred Stieglitz famously joked that we should pay certain “artists” to stop stay away from paint. But scientific evidence suggests that such “over-production” is essential to innovation and diversity. This is true in music, television, movies, and magazines. In these industries, executives often “green light” many more projects than they expect will be profitable, because audiences can and do make hits of projects that experts predicted would flop.
If we continue our current policy of supporting organizations instead of citizens, we will fail to identify all the projects that could facilitate economic recovery. We will continue to produce an arts sector that is overwhelmingly white and male, while our citizens are predominantly women and people of color. If we seek equality of access and representation — as every contemporary arts organization claims to — we must transform our funding structures.
