This visualization shows how the income and poverty relationship varies every year for each artist. This visualization represents the social and economic status of artists in the USA from 1950 to 2019. Click on the ‘play’ button on the top of the visualization to observe the variation of the median of the poverty level and total income of each art. The X-Axis indicates the total income (INCTOT) and Y-Axis indicates the poverty level (POVERTY). The art profession type is indicated in different colors. The area of the circles indicates the number of artists in a specific occupation.
What?
This visualization represents the social and economic status of artists in the USA from 1950 to 2019. Click on the “play” button on the top of the visualization to observe the variation of the median of the poverty level and total income of each art. The X-Axis indicates the total income (INCTOT) and Y-Axis indicates the poverty level(POVERTY). The art profession type is indicated in different colors. The area of the circles indicates the number of artists in a specific occupation.
Why?
This dynamic visualization helps us understand how artists of specific professions are doing economically in the last 70 years. This helps art enthusiasts and art researchers to get a brief idea of the economic position of each art profession. Art policymakers can make informed and data-oriented decisions and policies through this dynamic visualization.
Insights and Action:
- There is a sudden dip in the number of overall artists in 2001. This can be related to certain events in the US. Presidential election conflicts in 2000 and September 11 attacks in 2001 might have affected the economic positions of the people in the USA. With income instability among artists, there might have been few repercussions on the economic status of the artists which might have led artists to move to different income generating occupations.
- Occupations such as dancers and entertainers stayed among the lowest economic stability compared to other professions for the last 70 years in the art domain. Few policies such as free health insurance, scholarships/fee-waivers for dance students to pursue the art, invitation of dancers to certain art conferences, more news coverage on dancers will help the public gain more perspective on dancers and entertainers.
- There has been a steady increase in economic stability in Actors & Directors. More research can be done on artists under this profession to identify the factors that led to their improvement in income and population. These factors can be further be implemented in other art professions.
Note:
Used the Gapminder template to represent the economic stability of artists in the last 70 years. The data is pulled from the IPUMS USA website, crunched in R, and visualized in D3.
Topics
Artists, Income, Occupation, Poverty
Chart Type
Visualization Type
Citation
Visualization by: Ujwala Musku.
Data Source: Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Ronald Goeken, Megan Schouweiler, and Matthew Sobek. IPUMS USA: Version 12.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2022. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V12.0
Data from 2000–2019 are drawn from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey; data from 1950–1990 are based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 1% and 5% samples.