From the Field

Study Reframes How We Understand Native Arts Participation

Measuring What Matters, a new in-depth report by First Peoples Fund, illustrates the ways current survey designs often miss the full breadth of Native creative life, and demonstrates how culturally responsive survey methodologies can instead increase the accuracy and validity of survey results. Drawing on interviews with 78 Native creators and experts representing diverse art forms, tribal affiliations and regions, the report outlines three types of limitations often found in arts participation surveys; namely, there is a narrow recognition of art forms and activities, a limited acknowledgment of varied contexts for artistic and cultural participation, and a restrictive motivational framing for arts participation. More specifically, the interviews detailed:

Art forms and activities pertinent to Native communities—such as beadwork, regalia making, basketry, ceremonial dance and storytelling—appear to be excluded from survey questions that, implicitly or explicitly, center Western art forms and activities.
Native communities’ arts engagement happens in broader physical contexts, while current survey questions tend to emphasize arts engagement that happens in ticketed, entertainment or commercial contexts.
While surveys often define arts participation as leisure or professional work, for Native peoples creative expression is also a means of cultural preservation, social responsibility, spiritual practice and community healing.‍
Because the wording of current surveys fails to prompt cultural associations, many respondents unintentionally leave out vital aspects of their artistic and cultural lives.

The report also explains various survey design strategies that can expand art forms and activities, broaden contexts for artistic and cultural engagement and deepen motivational framing. In doing so, the report makes the case that a culturally flexible survey design is essential for creating survey items that reflect the full scope of people’s artistic and cultural experiences, and thereby helps accomplish the goal of producing representative arts participation data.

Interactive Dashboards on Arts Alumni Data

The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP) recently released the SNAAP Arts Alumni Data Hub, an interactive resource featuring national data from the 2022 SNAAP survey. The Data Hub includes three interactive dashboards on arts alumni educational experiences and labor market outcomes across the United States: educational satisfaction and skills, alumni careers and work experiences, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on arts alumni. Each dashboard can be filtered for academic degree level, personal income, graduation year and other key demographics, providing unique insights into the relationship between arts alumni and the creative economy.

New Research on Working Artists in the United States

Typically, a subset of the artists in the United States is not represented in federal labor surveys because their art making practice is not captured in the ways those surveys define labor. Since these artists are not represented in research, the best ways to support these artists are obscured. The National Survey of Artists, from NORC at the University of Chicago, addresses this issue in a new survey with an expansive, nationally representative sample of working artists. This sample, which includes the previously “invisible” population of artists, was constructed using NORC’s AmeriSpeak^® Panel and multiple nonprobability panels, and was calibrated using NORC’s TrueNorth methodology. This survey design allows the researchers to demonstrate more comprehensively how artists live, work and sustain their practices.

The data shows that artists across the United States face significant financial insecurity. For instance, more than half of artists reported being somewhat or very worried about at least one form of financial vulnerability—such as affording food, housing, medical care or utilities—and more than one-third reported using some form of public assistance. The data suggests artists have complex work arrangements, with 34% of artists reporting that they are fully self-employed, 50% are self-employed in their primary job, and 11% juggled three or more jobs in the past year. This nationally representative data also aligns with locally focused research detailing the financial situation of artists, which NASAA wrote about in March 2025 NASAA Notes.