In case anyone needed reminding, the Covid-19 pandemic was a brutal period for arts institutions and organisations, with declines in attendance and revenues that led many to reduce programming, lay off full-time and temporary staff, and in some cases shut down entirely. Many art institutions have struggled to rebound to the attendance and revenue levels they had sustained before the pandemic; The Art Newspaper’s annual surveys of museum attendance, for instance, show that many are attracting persistently lower attendance compared to 2019. However, some have emerged in even stronger position than before Covid, often thanks to local governments’ actions to provide higher levels of financial support for arts groups, according to a recently released report from DataArts, a research centre at Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas.
That report examines ten US cites (Atlanta, Cleveland, Des Moines, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento and Seattle) that had been collecting data on their arts sectors between 2019 and 2024, finding that increased levels of funding by municipal arts agencies is directly linked to strong financial performance and higher attendance outcomes across a city’s arts sector. On the other hand, declining levels of this kind of support are associated with “financial contraction, evidenced through declines in revenue and tightening bottom lines” at local arts institutions and organisations, according to the report.
The report notes that cities such as Atlanta, Cleveland, Phoenix and Sacramento, which grew or maintained municipal investments in culture, saw a stable or improving arts sector as they emerged from the pandemic, while Philadelphia and Seattle experienced periods of notable contraction.
“Phoenix is really notable in part because it’s one of the places where we see that real regrowth in audience engagement that fell so sharply during Covid,” says Jen Benoit-Bryan, the executive director of SMU DataArts. Phoenix “really rebounded much more than other cities”, she says, attributing this to the level of local arts agency support for cultural organisations, which increased fourfold—from accounting for just .85% of arts organisations’ budgets in 2019 to covering 4.2% of their budgets in 2024. The Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs in Atlanta “actually was at the very bottom of the ten cities back in 2019, covering about 1% of the expenses of cultural organisations, and they increased that substantially over the period”, she adds.
Another success story is the capital of California, Sacramento, whose arts sector was stable during the pandemic and emerged from it in a strong position because, according to the DataArts report, the city’s Office of Arts and Culture increased its support for local cultural organisations from just under 5% of their budgets in 2019 to over 8%. That enabled local arts organisations to “regrow their earned revenues, their ticket sales and programme offerings and becoming a little bit less reliant on the contributed revenue”, Benoit-Bryan says.
In Philadelphia, on the other hand, the budget for the city’s cultural agency “experienced the greatest contraction of all of the cities that we were looking at”, she says, noting that it “has gone from 7% of local government coverage of expenses in 2019 down to 1% in 2024. Its grants to cultural organisations per capita was at ¢10 per capita in 2019 and went down to ¢1 in 2024.” That drop-off had “huge ramifications across the sector”, she adds. “Philadelphia cultural organisations are more likely to be running deficits now than they were in the past, and they have had the steepest cuts in their staffing.” Philadelphia also suffered the biggest drop in audience and community participation in the arts among the ten cities surveyed in the DataArts report.
Benoit-Bryan says that as municipal support for cultural organisations dwindled between 2019 and 2024 in Philadelphia, the city’s overall budget grew from $4.7bn to $6.2bn, “outpacing inflation in its rate of growth. That indicates to me that other investment areas have been prioritised over the arts rather than a general contraction affecting the arts and other areas equally.”
Of the ten cities surveyed, Philadelphia saw the steepest decline in local arts funding per capita, and its organisations made the largest cuts to their workforces, as full-time staffing there fell 47%, by far the sharpest drop among the cities in the study, while revenues at arts organisations declined 26%. Though Benoit-Bryan is careful not to attribute these changes to a direct cause-and-effect relationship, she says “Philadelphia shows a cluster of related declines that moved together, and that pattern is worth taking seriously even without proof of causation”.
Still, according to David Andersson, the arts research lead at Bloomberg Associates, a philanthropic consultancy that is part of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which underwrote the SMU DataArts research, the survey found a strong “connection between local support and sector outcomes”. The level of local government support for arts groups in the ten cities in the study generally ranged between 5% and 10% of the organisations’ total expenses, but, Andersson says, even “the relatively small amount of support they’re able to give can have this outsized impact”.
Andersson notes that “one of the hypotheses that we have for why local government support and sustained local government support is so important is that it can help leverage other kinds of revenue, particularly other kinds of contributed revenue for these organisations. There’s something like a stamp of approval for organisations that have gotten through the hurdles of getting access to public dollars that can indicate to corporate supporters or private foundations that this organisation has its legs under it and it isn’t about to fold—there’s somebody else vouching for it in a way that opens some doors.”
An example of that type of leveraging, Andersson says, was New York City’s Covid-19 Response and Impact Fund, which collected over $100m from a consortium of private funders for nonprofit arts and human services organisations in 2020. “In order to be eligible,” he points out, “organisations needed to be recipients of New York City or New York State government funding.”
- The full SMU DataArts study, “City Arts Sector Trends: Divergence and Resilience Across Ten U.S. Cities (2019–2024)”, can be downloaded here.
