Arts Entrepreneurial Work in Changing Contexts

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly shifted the context of artistic and creative work, forcing individuals to adapt to wide-reaching changes in the way they operated in both work and life. Relying on interviews with data from 66 U.S.-based arts graduates, this article speaks to needs in sustaining creative life and work after the first year of the pandemic. Interviewees related that their needs for a sustainable creative work and life were primarily that they needed the social and physical distancing restrictions of the pandemic to end, more time and capacity to be creative, and monetary support. Ultimately, we argue that the changing context of the pandemic required substantial entrepreneurial ability toward being adaptable, superseding capacity for creativity during the first year of the pandemic. Our findings reflect that when arts entrepreneurs’ self-structured careers required new or intensified effort toward non-arts aspects of their work, their feelings of, or capacity for, creativity may be diminished.

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