NEA Survey: Artists are better educated and gaining ground against unemployment
Mae Ryan/KPCC
Ramiro Gomez paints in a spare bedroom that he uses as a studio in his West Hollywood apartment. In 2013, an NEA analysis of census bureau data found that art directors, fine artists and animators had an unemployment rate of 4.7 percent.
A new analysis released Monday by the National Endowment for the Arts found that nationwide, artists are gaining back some of the jobs that they lost during the recession. In 2013, unemployment for artists stood at 7.1 percent, down from a jobless rate of 9 percent in 2009 and 2010. Back in 2006, before the recession hit, the unemployment rate for artists was just 3.6 percent.
In addition, the new analysis found that in 2013, while 2.1 million people were working primarily as artists, another 271,000 people reported secondary jobs as artists in the U.S. Those with secondary art careers included professionals in a wide variety of jobs, including doctors, social workers, lawyers, librarians and clergy. These secondary art careers had been largely unrecognized following previous Census counts.
This is good news for statisticians looking to quantify the number of artists in the U.S., according to Sunil Iyengar, the NEA's director of research & analysis. Speaking to KPCC, Iyengar pointed out that artists are often very mobile or self-employed, making them hard to count.
"We know that in the arts, artists are oftentimes hard to identify through large data sets because for one thing, they often have multiple jobs," he said. "We were able to dig deeper."
The latest findings also show that artists have higher education levels than the general workforce: 65 percent held at least a bachelor's degree, compared to 32 percent of