A Time of Crisis: A National Survey of Arts and Culture during COVID-19 with a Focus on Black or African American and Hispanic Voices

Abstract

The dual crises of COVID-19 and our reckoning with systemic racism in the United States have created a necessary and overdue opportunity for reflection, adaptation, and change in the cultural field. This article, which shares preliminary findings from a study of the general public with an extensive oversample of culturally active Americans, is a resource to support this important movement. Working from the view that relevance and resilience are two-way streets, the researchers set out to understand what people and communities need from their cultural organizations now and in the future, and what cultural organizations can expect from communities. An open invitation to interested arts and culture organizations resulted in unprecedented participation across the sector: more than 650 organizations distributed the survey resulting in a sample of more than 120,000 respondents. Results are shared for the overall weighted sample as well as separately for Black or African American respondents and Hispanic or Latinx respondents, who are particularly underrepresented on the lists of arts and culture organizations in the United States.