NEA Arts Data Profile Series: Issue 1

"Equal Opportunity Data Mining: National Statistics about Working Artists"

Title of Dataset
EEO Tables for 2006-2010

Periodicity
Every 10 Years

Source/Sponsor
U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey; Multiple Agencies

Research Topic
Artists in the Workforce; Other Arts/Cultural Occupations

Notable Features

• Micro-geographic coverage. Data for all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, metro and micro areas; counties; and "places"

• Detailed occupations (including self-employed workers)

• Demographic and socioeconomic variables include age, gender, race and ethnicity, citizenship, disability status, industry affiliation, earnings, education level, employment status, place of residency, and place of work

National Overview

There are 2,081,735 million artists in the United States, identified by the occupation to which they which devoted the most hours in a given week. These artists fall into one of 11 occupations, and together they compose 1.35 percent of the total workforce.

Orientation (video)

Intro & Map

Artist Occupations

Sample Findings

NEA Tables from the EEO 2006-2010 Data

Additional datasets on Artist Occupations

MAP

Instructions: Hover over a state territory to see its artist workforce data. Point to the icon in the map's top-right corner to choose among different kinds of artist occupations. Clicking on a dot within a state will reveal artist workforce data and a state's "index rank" broken down by specific occupation type.  For each state, the index measures the number of workers in an artist occupation as a share of the state's whole labor force, relative to the U.S. average. The total number of U.S. workers in an artist occupation as a share of U.S. labor force has the index value of 1. The index rank ranges between 1 and 51 (the number of states plus the District of Columbia), with higher index values denoting greater numbers of artists per a state's labor force.]

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