General
The Friday after the 2024 presidential election, I met a friend for coffee and commiserating at a local bakery in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. Kentucky is a reliably red state, being within the first few – or even the first – states to be called for Trump in the last three elections. But Kentucky, like the rest of the South, is varied, complex, and misunderstood. Louisville, in particular, is an outlier. Louisville is the most diverse city in a state severely lacking diversity and ranks high on lists of LGBTQ-friendly cities. 57.4% of Louisvillians voted for Kamala Harris. People all around us were as quiet and gray as the city had been since Wednesday morning.
My friend and I sipped our lattes and talked about how we got here and what comes next. As the Director of a local literary nonprofit, she was already worried about the writers she supports, not to mention her staff. She explained how donations started to dry up overnight after Trump was elected in 2016. Before they could fully recover, the pandemic took its toll. Eight years later, he’s back in office, and yet again, there are signs that donors will divert their funds elsewhere.
The next week, over dinner, another nonprofit Director, this one in the visual arts. She told me the exact same story. When people who support progressive causes get scared, they pull their support of the arts to focus on supporting places like the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood, and social justice-oriented organizations.
The more I turned those conversations over in my head, the more troubled I became. Those donors are making a well-intentioned mistake. This is when those with the means should lean into supporting the arts, not pull away. It’s a potentially disastrous combination if individuals let their support dwindle precisely when government funding of the arts is at serious risk. During his first term, Trump tried to end funding to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). According to their website, the NEAs, an independent federal agency, is the country’s largest funder of arts and arts education. It remains to be seen what his budget will look like this time, along with the impact of having a Republican-controlled House and Senate that will likely support his agenda. The threat goes beyond money. Attempted book bans, for example, increased 65% between 2022 and 2023.
Let me share some data to support the argument that the arts are anything but frivolous. According to Forbes, in 2022, “the nonprofit arts and culture sector generated $151.7 billion of economic activity … [and] supported over 2.6 million jobs, provided $101 billion in personal income to residents, and generated $29.1 billion in tax revenue to local, state, and federal governments.” Access to the arts has been linked to improved academic performance in children and improved mental health in adults. And when adults actually participate in the arts, studies suggest there’s an increase in behaviors that contribute to societal well-being—things like increased civic engagement and greater social tolerance. There are even some reports out there that indicate the arts can help combat addiction and the opioid crisis, which has devastated Kentucky.
These studies highlight what I know to be true in my bones – the arts benefit both the people who create and the people who experience those creations. The benefit to artists was expressed succinctly in an Instagram post by the writer Sarah Lemon following the election: “It feels so dumb to be an artist when the world needs real help, but art saved me more than once, like a lamp handed to me in the dark, so I aim to pass along that light.”
Everyone deserves the chance to find that light. And who does or does not get to make art is deeply impacted by resources and money. Children born into families with financial resources are more than twice as likely to become artists, actors, or musicians, according to a study by Harvard. And the disparities when you factor in race are even more pronounced.
According to 2019 Federal Reserve data, the typical white family owns about $184,000 in wealth compared to just $23,000 for Black families and $38,000 for Hispanic families. This wealth gap directly affects who can afford arts education, who can take the financial risk of pursuing creative careers, and ultimately, whose voices get heard in our cultural spaces. When you consider that white families are also five to seven times more likely to be millionaires than Black or Hispanic families, it’s clear why we see such profound racial disparities in who gets to make art professionally.
Studies and data consistently show that supporting the arts has a positive impact on individuals and communities, including benefits like improved academic performance, enhanced critical thinking skills, increased social cohesion, and economic development, with research highlighting the positive effects of arts education on students’ academic achievements, creativity, and emotional well-being across various socioeconomic backgrounds; additionally, research indicates that communities with a vibrant arts scene tend to have higher levels of civic engagement and improved quality of life.
But that’s not why I found myself worrying over my friends’ words days later, even after I donated to both of their organizations. Sitting under a print by a local artist, sipping coffee from a handmade mug, with poetry collections from Kentucky natives stacked beside me, I was reminded of the many ways the arts make us human. They connect us: to each other, to our homes, to secret selves we might have never known otherwise. And, perhaps most importantly, they encourage us to think. To dream. How do we make it to something new if we give up the things that make us imagine?
Lucie Brooks is a poet, a professor, and a lifelong Kentuckian. She is the 2022 Kentucky State Poetry Society Chaffin/Kash poetry prize winner and a 2024 Grand Prix poetry prize finalist. You can read her in Taunt, Swing, Pegasus, and more.
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