By RANDY KENNEDY

A survey of American artists and how they are weathering the economic downturn has found that slightly more than half experienced a drop in income from 2008 to 2009, a blow to an already struggling group, two-thirds of whose members reported that they earned less than $40,000 last year.

More than 5,300 practitioners in fields like painting, filmmaking and architecture participated in the online survey, a larger response than expected, providing a detailed look at the state of America’s artists, a group that the Census Bureau numbers at more than two million.

Many of the findings - that working artists tend to work day jobs to support themselves; that more than a third don’t have adequate health insurance; that musicians and architects tend to do better than writers and painters - simply validate what artists themselves have long known.

But the survey also found that the recession has been exceptionally tough for many artists. Eighteen percent of those who responded said their income had dropped 50 percent or more in the last year.

The survey was conducted in July and August and commissioned by a nonprofit artist-support organization called Leveraging Investments in Creativity .

The researchers found that in general very few artists’ incomes approach six figures. While the majority of artists have college degrees, only 6 percent said they earned $80,000 or more.

“A lot of the artists who were reporting were telling us, ‘I live in a recession all the time, so this downturn has really not been so different for me,’ ” said Judilee Reed, the executive director of Leveraging Investments in Creativity.

Even artists who have second jobs said the climate for creative work was more difficult. Esther Robinson, a Brooklyn filmmaker whose 2007 documentary, “A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory,” was partly paid for with credit cards, money later recouped with an advance from a distributor, said, “This year there are almost no advances available for the same kind of film that is of a certain quality and that is theatrically releasable.”

Perhaps because artists tend to have an idealistic bent, the survey found, however, that many also reported upsides to the downturn: that it had given them freedom to experiment and to spend more time on their art when avenues for making money are closed.


Esther Robinson, a documentary filmmaker, said she does not see a way to finance her ideas. / OZIER MUHAMMAD/THE NEW YORK TIMES