This study examines a program designed to better support artists, their well-being, and autonomy: the Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) Artist Employment Program (AEP). This two-year initiative (June 2022 through June 2024) involved 300 artists and 98 collaborations with community-based organizations, municipalities, and tribal governments in New York State. This study focuses on a key component of the AEP: its use of two employment models, direct employment by a partner organization and employment by Tribeworks, a worker cooperative that provided employment and benefits for artists.

Why This Matters

This program has lessons for artists and the workforce at large: artists are at the forefront of many employment trends in the broader economy, from self-employment to freelance work, and have been particularly affected by the challenge of nontraditional employment, including relatively low wages, above-average unemployment and underemployment, and challenges in obtaining health coverage, which were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Testing the impact of the AEP and these employment models on artists and their partnering organizations lets us identify how best to build programs and policies that improve the well-being and stability of arts workers and support their communities.

What We Found

Both artists and partnering organizations viewed the AEP in a positive light, though not all partnerships succeeded.

• For artists, involvement led to increased personal well-being and financial stability and helped them develop new artistic practices and technical skills.
• For organizations, the AEP expanded the scope of their work and engagement in the community, showing those with less experience working with artists the value of incorporating art into their approach. These positive impacts generally held whether artists were directly employed by the partnering organization or used Tribeworks.

Although outcomes for artists were generally similar across employment model, there were distinctions by the number of AEP artists at partner organization, by race and ethnicity, and by the total number of employees employed at a given organization.

The AEP presents several lessons for program implementation:

• Inclusion: A partner like Tribeworks, by supporting smaller organizations, can open opportunities and partnerships to a broader range of participants.
• Flexibility: The AEP’s flexible model, which left the terms of collaborations to the artists and partnering organizations, let partnerships develop in ways that made the most sense to participants, but created uncertainty, especially at the start of the collaboration, that not all collaborations were able to overcome.
• Autonomy: The AEP also provides lessons for programs that want to preserve artist autonomy: from stipulating that artists had time for their own personal practice, to the roles that Tribeworks and CRNY played in helping support the collaborations.

In terms of policy ramifications, our research stresses the importance of treating artists and cultural workers as workers within the larger context of workforce policy, including the following:

• Implementing policies that account for nontraditional employment and devising better approaches for classifying artists and tracking their economic circumstances
• Highlighting the value of policies that link benefits and protections to people rather than jobs through extending wage and hour, antidiscrimination, and health and safety laws to independent contractors, including those in unemployment insurance and paid leave programs
• Illustrating how policy innovations, such as portable benefits, support for cooperative models, and efforts to minimize benefit cliffs can better serve artists, other workers, and our communities

How We Did It

Our findings are based on a range of sources. This included a review of documents, analysis of existing data sources and surveys on artists, and interviews with organizational contacts involved in the AEP’s design and implementation. We also created a leadership council of 11 participant artists who we met with to help refine research questions and inform the methodology and key takeaways. We also undertook a survey and focus groups with artists who participated in the program, and a survey and interviews with representatives of organizations that partnered with artists.