Arizona’s arts-and-culture sector — from theater and classical music to museums and art galleries — contributed more to the state’s economy in 2015 than mining, agriculture and forestry combined, according to a just-released national study.
Data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and the National Endowment for the Arts study showed that 90,000 Arizonans were employed in the arts in 2015, contributing $9 billion to the state’s economy that year, the latest for which the state has data.
Nationally, the study found that the arts contributed $763.6 billion to the U.S. economy, with 4.9 million employees and a combined payroll of more than $370 billion.
“It suggests that the creative economy is really a primary driver to the nation’s economy and the state’s,” said Steve Wilcox, marketing director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, the state agency charged with distributing public funds to arts organizations.
The NEA/Bureau of Economic Analysis study focused on employment in the arts and the trickle-down economic impact. While the study broke out state-by-state data, it didn’t hone in on cities and counties.
But the 2017 Americans for the Arts’ Creative Industries: Business & Employment in the Arts study did. Using data from business analytics giant Dun & Bradstreet, the study found that 4.9 percent of Pima County’s businesses were connected to the arts, representing 1.7 percent of the county’s overall employment.
The study found that more than 7,700 Tucson/Pima County workers were employed in the region’s 2,322 arts-related businesses, a number that Wilcox said was actually low, given that the data didn’t include most of the region’s nonprofit groups and individual artists.
Some of those nonprofit arts groups include the Tucson Symphony Orchestra, which employs 76 musicians among its workforce that numbers close to 100; and the Arizona Theater Company, which has more than 90 full- and part-time permanent employees and works with more than 700 actors, stage techs, musicians and other employees to put on its productions in Tucson and Phoenix.
The head of the Arts Foundation of Tucson and Southern Arizona said that in addition to paid employees, local arts organizations rely on some 165,000 volunteers — many of them one-timers, meaning they work one or two events a season.
“There is a total economic engine in the arts here if we can better support the arts and turn some of those volunteer jobs into paid positions,” said Carol Varney, the foundation’s newly installed executive director.
Varney, who served for several months as the interim director before being named to the position on March 8, has spent the past several weeks talking to city and county lawmakers about the need for public arts funding. The foundation, formerly the Tucson Pima Arts Council, lost nearly half of its annual funding after years of dizzying cuts attributed to the recession.
One of the biggest cuts came in 2011, when the foundation went from receiving $400,000 in state funds to $100,000, according to public records from that period.
Varney said city funding this year is $350,000, $170,000 of which is earmarked for grants to Tucson’s arts organizations. She said many of those groups have told her they need infrastructure, which can include improvements to their physical structures or money to pay their artists.
“They may not be able to get their books done to get the grants. They may not be able to keep paying the artists that do the performances or keep doing the works,” she cited as examples.
The arts commission’s Wilcox said his group will fare no better when it comes to state funds. The commission requested $2 million in state money, but Gov. Doug Ducey left it entirely out of the picture, as the state has done consistently since 2012. That also was around the time that state lawmakers raided what was left of the $20 million state-funded Arizona ArtShare endowment established in 1989 to fund the arts.
In the 2017-18 fiscal year, the commission was given $1.5 million from the interest accrued in the state’s so-called “rainy day fund,” Wilcox said.
“We’re hoping for a repeat of that, but those are one-time allocations that are made for a single fiscal year,” he said.
Wilcox said the NEA/Bureau of Economic Analysis study “makes an important case for the economic impact of arts and culture broadly” as a driving economic force that encourages people and business to come to the state.
Arizona Theatre Company managing director Billy Russo said he thinks that should be the message he and other arts managers and advocates should be giving to lawmakers at all levels of government.
“When they talk about our economic impact to the cities, they always talk about how much (audiences) spend,” Russo said. “It’s actually a bit deeper than that. How do arts and culture attract new business here, new industry? I think we have a big impact there that is not as easily tangible.”
