Artists have been begging for pandemic relief for nearly a year. In New York, Gov. Cuomo’s announcement of the NY PopsUp program, a series of free performances headlined by celebrities like Chris Rock and Alec Baldwin, was hardly the answer we’ve been waiting for. In fact, to many of us, it felt like a slap in the face.
Most working artists don’t need a round of applause. We need jobs. More specifically, we need a jobs program that will put the most vulnerable among us back to work. Performing artists in particular have been devastated by the pandemic. According to the National Endowment for the Arts, 52% of actors, 55% of dancers and 27% of musicians were unemployed as of the third quarter of 2020. The overall unemployment rate in that period was just 8.5%. However, even these numbers fail to capture the scale of the crisis. That’s because most artists are gig workers, a segment of the workforce notoriously undercounted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Organizations that reach out to artists directly provide a fuller picture. In its most recent poll, Americans for the Arts found that 95% of creative workers surveyed had lost income due to the pandemic, and 63% were fully unemployed and reported losing an average of $21,800 in income from creative work. Black, Indigenous and artists of color were unemployed at higher rates: 69%, compared to 60% of white artists. Music Workers Alliance found that 71% of musicians and DJs surveyed had lost three quarters or more of their income. In the most recent Dance/NYC Covid-19 Impact Survey, 74% of independent dance workers reported needing assistance to buy food. Arts and culture contribute $119.9 billion to the New York economy each year. The arts are also a main driver of tourism, a $117.6 billion industry in New York before the pandemic. Yet the people who make that world-renowned art have not received proportionate relief. Pandemic Unemployment Assistance is set to expire in March. Even if congressional Democrats succeed in renewing the program, our unemployment system is ill-equipped to serve gig workers. Despite expanded eligibility, many artists were never able to access enhanced benefits under the CARES Act.
In this Thursday, April 23, 2020, photo dancer and choreographer Netta Yerushalmy warms up during a zoom dance rehearsal in her living room on the Lower East Side neighborhood of New York. Yerushalmy has built a career in movement and community. Both are gone now. Across the city, the coronavirus pandemic has upended almost everyone’s lives, but the arts community — the dancers, actors, visual artists and designers, who never made much income to start with — is especially suffering, imperiling New York City as a creative capital.
Struggling venues are being bailed out to the tune of $15 billion through the Save Our Stages program, but it’s already clear that won’t be enough for a full recovery. Little of that money will trickle down to the people on stage. Performing artists have not just lost our jobs. We are facing the loss of our careers. Without intervention, we’ll be forced to leave the arts behind. Many of us, especially the most marginalized, already have. We risk a future in which careers in the arts — already so difficult to attain for those without wealth and connections — are further limited to a privileged, and mostly white, few. Fortunately, we know where to begin in addressing this problem. We’ve done it before. In 1935, with the unemployment rate at 20%, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration. This New Deal program put people to work by investing $92 billion in today’s dollars in infrastructural and cultural projects. Each day, Americans use WPA-built buildings, bridges and parks. But few realize that the WPA also paid artists to create.
The Daily News Flash Newsletter Weekdays Catch up on the day’s top five stories every weekday afternoon. You are now following this newsletter. See all newsletters. The arts funding arm of the WPA, Federal Project Number One, included the Federal Theatre, Dance, Art, Music and Writers’ Projects. These programs supported the work of thousands of artists, including Doris Humphrey, Katherine Dunham, Arthur Miller, Orson Welles, Countee Cullen, Aaron Douglas, Jackson Pollock and Aaron Copland, to name only a few. Federal One also made art more accessible, funding art centers and education, commissioning public murals, and staging low- and no-cost performances.
Family of victim enraged at bail release of suspect in fatal Manhattan shooting: ‘Why would they let him go?’Art, the WPA affirmed, is a public good. Crucially, it also respected artists as workers, and recognized that there is dignity in doing the work one is trained to do. Once more, we can lift artists out of poverty by acknowledging these truths. State Assemblywoman Patricia Fahy and Sen. Rachel May have championed a state-level WPA since last year. Their bill, reintroduced this year, focuses on creating jobs for New York’s struggling artists. Similar legislation has been introduced in Massachusetts. Just as social insurance programs began on the state level and were adopted as federal programs after the Great Depression, these states can lead the way to a new federal WPA by acting now. How can we fund such a program? America’s billionaires have grown $1.1 trillion richer since the start of the pandemic. We have the wealth. We simply lack the political will to redistribute it. New York is the perfect testing ground for this idea: It’s home to more billionaires than nearly any other state and boasts the second-most robust arts and cultural sector in the country. We can save the arts by taxing the rich. Henderson is a dancer and writer.