How artists build careers in arts-rich rural Minnesota

Last week, I spent a day at University of Colorado’s College of Arts and Media. I’d been invited by their dean, Larry Kaptain, to present my work on artists’ careers. Since 2002, I’ve been studying artists’ careers and contributions to community, using Minnesota as my laboratory.

We met informally with the college’s provost, who posed lots of intriguing questions about how an arts and media school can serve its larger community. How can they position their students for careers in a rapidly changing visual and electronic world? How to prepare them for nontraditional work settings — as entrepreneurs, consultants, and short-term employees as well as full-time positions?

My talk followed. I showcased artists who had taken their work beyond the studio to make a living and who contribute to communities near and far. Minneapolis’ Vara Kamin, for instance, figured out how to project her immense, colorful and engaging abstract oils, painted at her northeast Minneapolis California Building studio, onto manufactured substrates. Dozens are now installed all over the world in medical settings where patients are captive in machines.

Artists are more likely to be self-employed than workers in most other occupations. Some 65 percent of writers are self-employed, 57 percent of visual artists and 41 percent of musicians. Performing artists, designers and architects are less likely to be self-employed, but still triple the rate for the workforce as a whole. Artists are also more likely to move cross-country and between rural towns and cities than most other workers. Examples: for Minnesota, in child-rearing years and after retirement, artists leave the Twin Cities metro for Greater Minnesota homes and workplaces in surprising numbers, while younger artists throng to the Cities.

Who employs artists? Film, radio and TV; journalism; photography; colleges, universities and K-12 schools hire thousands of artists in good jobs, mostly with benefits. Others work in industries where they form a small share of the workforce — musicians, for instance, in eating and drinking places.

I’ve served for 10 years on the National Advisory Board for the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project. We’ve been surveying arts graduates of colleges, universities, conservatories and arts high schools, documenting how artists rate their training and where and how they are working now. About half of our respondents work in the arts, and another half work in other industries. Of the latter, may attest to how their arts training has helped them in their careers.

I also explored, in a California project, how arts organizations hire artists. Artists formed the vast majority of people (57 percent) who are paid by California arts nonprofits, but most work as temporary contractors. Fundraisers, administrators and programmers account for the rest, more often on salary but a surprising share also on contract.

How does Minnesota’s artist workforce compare with other places? Among the 30 largest metro areas in the U.S., Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco host the largest contingents of artists in their workforces, followed by five metros hosting 20- to 40 percent more artists than the national average: Washington D.C., Seattle, Boston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and San Diego, in that order. In follow-up work done by Texas researchers on the great recession, they found that Minneapolis-St. Paul posted the highest rate of increase in our artist workforce during the years of the great recession, 2006-2009, years when the top three barely held even.

What explains Minnesota’s growing arts ecology? Our generous arts funders, our many artists’ centers, Minnesota-based Artspace’s artist housing and presentation spaces, and our Minnesota State Arts Board’s generosity. The latter, bolstered by Legacy funding since 2009, has enhanced our artist-friendly environment. Artists are flourishing outside the Twin Cities from Duluth to Rochester and in small towns like New York Mills and Fergus Falls. Including in Carlton County.

I closed by talking about the many interviews with artists I’ve conducted over the past 16 years. I learned about their challenges by asking them about their teachers and the gatekeepers who opened or closed doors for them. And by reading, listening to or viewing their works, and taking in performances. Other social scientists helped me, especially anthropologists and sociologists.

My favorite project? The McKnight-funded study with Ojibwe writer Marcie Rendon: “Native Artists,” with lots of artist profiles, including Carlton County’s Sarah Agaton Howes, Lyz Jaakola, Jim Northup, Jeff Savage, and Karen Savage-Blue. Find it on my website, annmarkusen.com.

Economist Ann Markusen is an emerita professor from the University of Minnesota and lives in Red Clover Township, Carlton County.