- Sector Scan
Counting the Uncounted: Artists Living on the Margins of Federal Statistics
- Posted Oct 20, 2025
6-minute read
Artists are everywhere—and somehow invisible in the data. If you hold a steady job in an arts occupation, surveys like the American Community Survey (ACS) and Current Population Survey (CPS) will find you. But if you’re juggling gigs, hustles, caregiving, and a nonlinear career? You’re likely to slip through the cracks—both in federal statistics and in the support systems designed to help you. Even the question of who counts as an artist is debated. Stories about these artists are easy to find; credible surveys are not. A few exceptions—like the Chicago Arts Census and the Artist Relief surveys—show just how rare, and hard-won, good evidence can be.
Fortunately, we can now draw on a new resource that captures this hidden population. In spring 2022, Creatives Rebuild New York fielded the Portrait of New York State Artists (PoA) survey. Its distinguishing strength is scale and reach: it recruited widely through an open call associated with CRNY’s Guaranteed Income for Artists program, which offered $1,000 per month for 18 months. Eligibility for the program hinged on four simple criteria—self-identify as an artist/culture bearer/maker, age 18 or older, New York State residency, and income below the local self-sufficiency standard—and over 22,000 eligible artists applied. Almost 90 percent of the survey respondents were recruited through this program, and as a result, PoA provides unusually rich coverage of artists who are otherwise difficult to capture in conventional datasets.
This is a remarkable collection of artists—far more than we would ever be able to identify using the Census, payroll data, or other standard survey techniques. After supplying eight demographic criteria that were accounted for during the selection process for the program, these artists had the option to fill out the longer, Portrait of Artists survey. Most of them did. And what follows is a description of these 13,777 artists, re-scaled to represent the full group of 22,000. Of course, these are New York State resident artists—so even this group might not generalize to the artists in your region.
Who are these artists?
Given the eligibility rules, we should expect these artists to all be 18+ and financially struggling. The data bear this out—but the specifics are striking. The average age is 35.7 years, with half of artists aged 32 or younger, which is notably younger than portraits of US artists from more ‘official’ sources like the ACS. (The NEA reports median ages of 40 in 2005 and 41 in 2012-2016.) These artists also report a median household income of only $20,000 per year, with a mean of roughly $23,000.
Let that sink in: fully 81% of them lived in New York City on that income. And remember, these figures represent household income—not just the artist’s earnings. Compare this to federal statistics: the NEA touts median annual earnings of about $70,000 , but that’s individual income. The median household earnings from the ACS for artists runs closer to $122,000 per year. The gap isn’t just large—it’s a chasm that reveals how many artists federal data simply don’t see.
The demographics can tell an equally important story. Artists outside of the typical federal statistics differ on other essential dimensions, too. The tables below offer some glimpses into how these artists identified themselves along race, gender identity, and other dimensions. Survey takers could ‘mark all that apply,’ giving us a rich description. Notice the lower representation of whites and greater representation of Black or African American among these artists compared to total New York State population—this group skews more toward the racial profile of the Big Apple. Many of these identity dimensions are not captured well, or at all, in big federal datasets like the Census, making the PoA’s insights crucial. The marginalized make a strong showing here.
| Race/Ethnicity (select all) | Share of Respondents |
| White | 39.3% |
| Black or African American | 30.8% |
| Hispanic/Latinx | 20% |
| Asian | 11% |
| Indigenous/First Nation/Alaska Native | 5.5% |
| Arab/Middle Eastern | 2.6% |
| Pacific Islander/Native Hawaiian | 0.6% |
| Other | 7.1% |
| Gender Identity (multi-select possible) | Share of Respondents |
| Woman | 45.9% |
| Man | 41% |
| Nonbinary | 14.4% |
| Two-Spirit | 2% |
| Other | 2.9% |
| Identity/Status | Share of Respondents |
| LGBTQIAP+ | 44.9% |
| Transgender | 5.9% |
| Immigrant | 17.3% |
| Disabled/Deaf | 10.9% |
You can find the PoA data and documentation at ArtsAnalytics.org. There you can view all the questions and make your own infographics! Taken together, these results depict a large, diverse, and frequently unseen segment of New York’s creative workforce—artists who are younger, lower-income, and more likely to live at the margins of traditional employment than the portraits we get from federal statistics.
The work and lives of these “unseen” artists
Now to the day jobs (and night gigs). The earnings mix is exactly what you’d expect from a creative hustle economy: gigs lead the way at 47.6%, with part-time work close behind (34.8%), and full-time jobs the outlier at 7.7% (see How Artists Currently Earn Money graph). Only 17.5% say all their income comes from art, and 10.6% point to other streams like royalties.
The second chart (Work Arrangements & Benefits) tells the same story from another angle: roughly one in two identify as freelancers, two in five as employees—often both, which is the point. These makers are creatively financing their lives outside of the ‘norm’ of full-time employment. About 18.7% report other non-job income, and 82.7% have health insurance. In short, this is a patchwork economy built on gigs and hybrid roles, with standard full-time posts very much the exception.
But hustle economy doesn’t tell the whole story of these artists’ lives. Behind the studio door is a lot of care work—essential, unpaid, and common. Almost a third of PoA artists are caregivers. About one in six look after kids (16.2%), one in seven support an adult (13.2%), and a smaller share care for a partner (2.2%). Artists can, of course, wear more than one caregiver hat. The Caregiving Among PoA Artists chart gives a quick read: a meaningful slice of the creative workforce is also holding up households.
Here's what makes this portrait especially striking: despite the financial precarity, the mindset is remarkably resilient. A full 73.2% "agree/strongly agree" that they lead a purposeful/meaningful life and 60.3% are optimistic about the future. Conversely, fewer than 22% disagree with the idea that they feel agency over their future and fewer than 30% disagree with the idea that they had good mental health last month. At the same time, only 45.8% believe the general public values their work, even as 86.7% report feeling confident articulating their creative process and labor (see Well-being Snapshot graphic for more details).
What this tells us
This snapshot illuminates an under-appreciated segment of New York’s cultural workforce: diverse, frequently unseen, and essential. These artists sustain creativity and community life even amid low incomes, gig-based employment, and substantial caregiving responsibilities. They report high levels of purpose, optimism, and confidence in their work—yet less than half believe the public values what they do.
That disconnect matters. While federal statistics paint a picture of artists earning $70,000 or living in households with $122,000 in income, this dataset reveals a parallel reality: thousands of artists operating in the margins, financially struggling yet creatively vital. The PoA doesn't capture all artists, but it documents a population that conventional surveys miss entirely—the very population most in need of support and most likely to be overlooked. Understanding who these artists are is the first step toward ensuring they're counted, seen, and supported.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Doug Noonan is a professor of public and environmental affairs at the O’Neill School at IU Indianapolis and former Donna Wilhelm Research Fellow for SMU DataArts. His research focuses on a variety of policy and economics issues related to cultural affairs, the urban environment, neighborhood dynamics and quality of life. His current research topics include the arts labor force and the gig economy, crowdfunding and entrepreneurship, community flood management, green buildings, historic preservation, and environmental justice.
Noonan is co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Cultural Economics, an elected executive board member of the Association of Cultural Economics International, director of research initiatives for the O’Neill Center for Cultural Affairs, and director of the Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab. His research has been sponsored by a variety of organizations (e.g., National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, National Endowment for the Arts) on topics like policy adoption, environmental risks, energy, air quality, spatial modeling, green urban revitalizations and cultural economics.
Connecting all of these research projects are issues of quality of life, the built environment, and policy effects on inequality. Noonan joined the O’Neill School after spending more than a decade on the faculty of the School of Public Policy at Georgia Tech.