Arts Employment Is Burgeoning in Some Rural Areas
Tim
Wojan
The “art scene” is commonly associated
with the largest cities, like New York, Los Angeles,
and San Francisco. Indeed, arts employment is high
in these and other major U.S. cities. However, ERS
research confirms that, increasingly, the arts are
concentrating in other, less populated areas throughout
the country, including small, completely rural counties.
The emergence of these nontraditional arts magnets,
especially since 1990, demonstrates the ability
of some rural areas to attract creative talent and
is related to the growing number of initiatives
promoting rural cultural tourism.
As nonmetro arts employment figures
continue to rise, development strategies to promote
rural arts and related tourism are increasing in
number. The concentration of artists in a relatively
small number of places suggests that successful
strategies will not be widespread. The single characteristic
most strongly associated with rural arts magnets
in 1990 and 2000 was the ability to retain college-educated
workers.
Information on county-level employment
in the arts is available every 10 years in the Census
of Population. The arts employment share consists
of “art and design workers” and “entertainers
and performers, sports and related workers.”
(The two categories include some workers not engaged
in artistic pursuits (such as athletes and industrial
designers), but they make up a small share of arts
employment, and are very rare in nonmetro areas.)
The Census data support the widely held view that,
on average, artists tend to locate in central cities
of the largest U.S. metro areas and are least prevalent
in completely rural counties.
However, the Census data also
show that metro and nonmetro areas as a whole experienced
robust growth in arts employment. Growth was fastest
in rural areas not adjacent to cities, The nonmetro
growth in arts employment did not occur uniformly
across the United States, but was concentrated in
select counties.
In 1990, concentrations of artists
in nonmetro counties were strongly associated with
natural amenities in the Mountain West and the Northeast.
Nonmetro counties with the highest shares of arts
employment in 1990 included Nantucket, MA; Pitkin
(containing Aspen), CO; and Teton, WY. In the 2000
data, several counties in the Texas Hill Country
(Gillespie and Llano) had high arts employment shares,
along with nonmetro counties in the Great Plains
(Riley, KS), Midwest (Decatur, IA, and Bayfield,
WI) and Southeast (Lincoln, GA, Oktibbeha, MS, and
Mitchell, NC). Most of these counties offered considerable
tourism and recreation activities or housed a large
college-going and college-educated population.
This
finding is drawn from . . . |
| ERS
County-level Creative Class Codes.
“The Emergence of Rural Artistic Havens:
A First Look,” Timothy R. Wojan, Dayton
M. Lambert, and David A. McGranahan, Agricultural
and Resource Economics Review, 36:1,
April 2007. |
|
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