How Guaranteed Income Can Support the Arts—And Ourselves

It’s the spring of 2022. I’m on my tenth call of the day supporting applicants to the Creatives Rebuild New York’s (CRNY) Guaranteed Income for Artists program. This time, I’m speaking with a musician, confirming that she is indeed eligible, verified, and will soon begin receiving monthly payments of $1,000 for the next 18 months. During the call, I learned not just that this artist earned so little income in 2021 that she was not required to file federal income tax but also that she is a Grammy-nominated artist.

This is the third time in one day that I have learned of people in our program—artists dedicated to honing their craft and offering their gifts to society—who have received acclaim that most people would equate to some level of financial security. For example, another artist had their work shown at the Whitney Museum. A third had their work featured in the New York Times.

Despite the accolades, these artists were low-income and eligible for our program, which means they’d fallen through the severed US social safety net. These are people who, like millions of Americans, simply don’t have enough money to make ends meet and stand to benefit from the support of a guaranteed income.

With over 22,000 applications to our program, it is obvious that the US system of supporting artists is grossly inadequate. Could a regular public program of guaranteed income, especially for artists, make a difference? That is the critical policy question that our pilot intended to explore.

Structure of a Guaranteed Income Pilot Program

CRNY’s program began through a three-year, $125 million dollar investment from the Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation. It was at once a pandemic relief effort and a systems-level experiment to reimagine the structures required for artists to have economic security in New York State.

While the pandemic revealed ugly truths about the fragility of our support systems, artists had told us long before that yes, water is wet.

Alongside robust research efforts, narrative change campaigns, and policy work, CRNY implemented two large-scale programs that moved money directly to artists. One was an artist employment program, which provided two years of salary at $65,000 for 300 artists in collaboration with nonprofit organizations, designed along the lines of the landmark Comprehensive Employment Training Act of the 1970s.

The other was a guaranteed income program that provided 2,400 artists across the state with 18 months of recurring payments, with recipients enrolled on a rolling basis from June 2022 through March 2024. All told, artists received $43.2 million in guaranteed income payments.

Ours was one of the largest guaranteed income pilots in the nation, designed to serve artists across all disciplines and prioritizing those who face structural barriers to economic security—meaning artists who are BIPOC, queer, disabled, immigrants, caregivers, justice impacted, and/or living in a rural part of the state. The work was designed to build momentum on burgeoning cash programs throughout the country, which the Stanford Basic Income Lab estimates at more than 100 in the past few years.

The Precarious Position of Artists

The precarious position of artists is hardly a new conversation. A year ago, an NPQ article noted that for most artists, “passion does not pay the rent.” While the pandemic revealed ugly truths about the fragility of our support systems, artists had told us long before that yes, water is wet. It’s no surprise that more than half of artists in New York earning below $25,000 annually.

Artists knew that the funding infrastructure for the arts mirrored our larger broken financial system, where the ability to live is based on a narrow definition of productivity and paid labor.

For artists, the signs of this broken relationship include highly competitive and often opaque grants, temporary and unprotected gigs in and outside of the arts, and what many have deemed starvation wages from large corporate platforms such as streaming services.

With a guaranteed income of $1,000 a month, artists can seek healing and find restoration for themselves.

The COVID-19 pandemic made all this even more obscene. The artists who moved us through the enormous grief, fear, and upheaval of the early years of the pandemic did so without much stability. A cherished poem, a song on repeat, a beautifully designed public health campaign explaining how to mask—it isn’t hard to find where and how artists are in the very fabric of society.

And yet, during that time, artists were losing income at a massive scale both due to canceled events and because the safety net was never strong enough to catch them. In 2020, New York City lost two-thirds of its performing arts jobs.

The Impact of Guaranteed Income

Guaranteed income greets the arts sector at an interesting time, with several reports released this year about the impact of pilots and an organized, committed core of practitioners. Ensuring that artists are included in the future of guaranteed income policy unlocks key tensions in our society about what counts as work and who deserves to be well and whole. (Spoiler alert: all of us!)

Our preliminary findings reaffirm what makes guaranteed income so compelling, not just for artists but for everyone. With the often-referenced figure that close to 40 percent of Americans cannot afford a $400 emergency, it’s significant that our research shows that a guaranteed income helped artists prioritize debt and savings while also paying their bills.

With a guaranteed income of $1,000 a month, artists can also seek healing and find restoration for themselves. Our research points specifically to the enormous impact of stable income on mental health. Participants in our program reported feeling down/depressed or hopeless at a 39 percent lower rate than those who did not receive guaranteed income.

This in turn fuels them to continue their work and engagement in community. Throughout history, artists have engaged in healing practices for themselves and others. In modern times, that takes many forms, such as leading trauma-informed arts education in public schools, art therapy, and preserving the cultural heritage of Indigenous communities.

We know that people do not live single-issue lives. Artists are many things beyond their vocations—they are parents, caregivers, people living with disabilities, and much more. As many in the guaranteed income space have pointed out, our system of caregiving has yet to offer financial compensation commensurate with care work’s essential worth.

Our research indicates that guaranteed income helped artists have more time and space for caregiving. One artist shared with us the family connection she was able to reclaim due to having the space, time, and cash to attend to her daughter: “I am low income and a full-time caregiver to my 18-year-old disabled daughter. Worry about money fuses with worry about her life and becomes a super worry.…The most amazing and surprising impact of this was that it allowed me to enjoy my daughter more. All the time distracted by survival is time I can’t love and enjoy my children, my family.”

While philanthropy has an important role to play in supporting the overall funding infrastructure for the arts, longer-term policy solutions are critical.

Although deeply important, the quantitative evidence alone of cash policies does not cover the myriad positive effects recipients experience. Marlon—a single father, DJ, producer, software engineer, and Lyft driver—shared with us that guaranteed income payments allowed him the financial stability to plan trips to Florida to spend quality time with his daughter. The strain of living in two states with limited income had taken a toll on their relationship. “Being able to see her without stressing about the cost of a ticket,” he said, “was invaluable.”

For Sasha, a professional choreographer and dancer, the payments afforded her the ability to cover the cost of visiting and caring for a sick parent. “I thought the money would help with my art, but it ended up being a lifeline as I cared for my mother in her final days. It was like having bereavement leave—it truly saved me.”

The Work Ahead

The work ahead must honor these stories as part of the narrative change needed to accept and implement a guaranteed income in policy.

While philanthropy has an important role to play in supporting the overall funding infrastructure for the arts, longer-term policy solutions are critical. Relegating this work exclusively to philanthropy reinforces the notion that we don’t need to care for each other under our social contract, because someone more powerful will.

The Music Workers Alliance draws a strong parallel to the system of compensation for musicians, “With a growing number of musicians looking to crowdfunding and other pay-what-you-can tools to generate income for themselves, paying for music feels less like compensating someone for their labor and more like a philanthropic exchange. Philanthropy feels optional in a way that an invoice doesn’t—and yields precarious income that differs starkly from stable wage work.”

Philanthropy can, however, be part of the driving force for long-term policy change. That might look like moving money to grassroots organizations and advocates to creatively inspire and mobilize their bases to make policy change a reality.

A Broader Vision

Guaranteed income moves cash directly into the hands of people who need it. The research behind the pilots demonstrates the positive impact of guaranteed income on a diverse set of people across many different contexts. But short-term initiatives cannot be expected to transform the living conditions of millions; advocacy to move governments to support policy change is imperative.

For this to occur, guaranteed income work should be in solidarity with other movements for economic justice, for example, movements for reparations and abolition. It should also be aligned with artists seeking systemic changes to create a solidarity economy. In a way, claiming the radical roots of guaranteed income—led by the powerful Black women leaders of the Civil Rights era—may be the key to guaranteed income becoming part of a multi-platform policy solution for an economy that truly puts people over profit.

While we continue to champion a guaranteed income, we need to ensure that artists continue to be supported by the movement, and are included in pilot efforts as well as narrative change and power building experiments. Most importantly, we must ensure they are paid for their essential labor. We need our artists compensated to imagine and realize a more just world.