By Lissa Soep, Senior Scholar-in-Residence, YR Media

About a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, YR Media posted an invitation across its social channels.

“Gather some homies and roomies,” the post said. “The vibes will get wild.”

YR Media, where I’ve worked for more than 20 years, is a media, technology, and music training center and platform for emerging, primarily BIPOC content creators. The organization had partnered with another Oakland-based arts group to create an interactive variety show streaming “sound, color, and love” from a stellar lineup of talent. Below the invitation’s caption, a one-minute video filled the screen with black-and-white static radiating off a spinning circle containing a lightbulb and stick of dynamite.

Reflecting back on the event—and other strikingly creative experiences that YR Media and like-minded arts organizations produced during the pandemic—I find myself asking: where would such activities fit in the National Endowment for the Arts’ 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts?

Admittedly, I was not the target audience for most of these events. For starters, I was the parent of young people, not a young person myself. But even I understood how much we needed structured opportunities to reconnect with artistic expression, freedom, and one another. What’s more, I sensed that a key aspect of what made those activities special was the fact that they defied categorization. At a time when life had become so fundamentally upended, it was fitting that our art, too, experimented with novel forms.

The event that YR Media posted about that Saturday night combined hip-hop, motion graphics, retrofuturism, and conviviality. Another digital arts series that the organization launched around the same time invited young people, every other week, to co-produce beats using themed sound libraries (e.g., “Vintage Jumbo Synthesizer,” “Dirty Electric Sounds,” etc.) and share them via Instagram Live, Discord, and Twitch. Working remotely, a different group of YR Media contributors met online with peers and editors to craft, record, and distribute personal audio essays, videos, and podcast episodes, reaching audiences in the hundreds of thousands. Each of these events mixed a range of art forms, blurred the line between creating and consuming art, and unlocked new learning opportunities without necessarily announcing themselves as pedagogical. While such activities were potentially significant in the lives of young adults, it’s hard to say how, if at all, they would register in the minds of survey respondents prompted to report on their arts participation habits.

The NEA’s 2022 SPPA survey is a vital contribution to our understanding of arts engagement over time. Tapping a nationally representative sample of respondents as young as 18, the study reveals broad trends across gender, race and ethnicity, and other factors. And yet, like any quantitative instrument, a survey can’t always capture emergent or boundary-crossing phenomena. Viewed against the backdrop of qualitative insights, the study’s findings elicit ideas that transcend clean counts or statistical rates of growth and decline.

Take, for example, the specific set of performing arts activities measured by the 2022 survey: jazz; Latin, Spanish, or salsa music; classical music; opera; musical and non-musical theater; ballet; other kinds of dance; and outdoor performing arts festivals. Compared to five years earlier, a lower percentage of respondents said they participated in this range of activities, but a higher percentage reported participating in performing arts activities not listed in the survey. The NEA’s report suggests that the unspecified activities might include any number of arts genres: “rock or pop, rap or hip-hop, folk or country, or music from other countries and cultural traditions, in addition to comedy/improv, circus acts, or magic shows.” Twenty-one percent of adults surveyed in 2022 attended one of these “other” types of arts events, up from 15 percent five years earlier.

This key finding calls to mind related discussions about the implications of survey categories that are differentiated versus those generalized into catch-all options (e.g., “some other race,” as used in previous U.S. Census Bureau reporting). The fact that participation in “other” performing arts activities rose in comparison to 2017 points to an intriguing development that’s hard to parse, given how little we know about the experiences contained within this “everything else” answer.

Interactive variety shows, beat-making challenges, peer-to-peer audio narrative workshops—all would be nearly impossible to reduce to a survey’s list of options. To better understand what these data points might mean, I turned to some young-adult participants at YR Media for their interpretations and insights.

Reflecting on the drop in some forms of arts participation detected in the survey, 26-year-old Markel Collins—an advisor to YR Media from Las Vegas—said the economy is a big factor. “The cost of everything is stretching everybody, not just adults but kids as well. Everybody actually would want to get into these spaces, but the funds are not there.” And with so many of us in front of our screens for so much of the time, Collins noted, it can be hard to break away “to actually go out and do certain things.”

“If you look at the things listed,” added Chai Turner, a 19-year-old college student from Massachusetts, “a lot of them are considered traditionally, quote unquote, elite forms of art.” Participating in, say, opera or ballet presupposes familiarity with and interest in those traditionally exclusionary art forms, access to places where one can experience them, and enough of a sense of belonging to inspire spending time in those places—in addition to the money to cover the cost of admission.

Contrast these conditions to a very different, richly creative arts activity that Turner offered as a counter-example: “cosplay,” where participants dress up as characters from popular media—films, books, television shows, games—and gather for conventions, or “cons,” where they compare craft and revel in shared cultural touchpoints.

“The heart of it is fan culture,” marked by low barriers to entry and the embrace of unconventional modes of expression, Turner told me. Costs for materials and travel can certainly be involved, but a peer-based, DIY sensibility often prevails. “In a time where our hobbies are often encouraged to be monetized,” they observed, cosplay is “a weird standout” because “everyone that's doing it is just doing it for fun.”

Fun. What an important concept at any point in the history of arts participation, but especially at a time when other sources of joy—theater rehearsals, marathon studio sessions, singing along to music with a crew of friends—were off the table due to the health risks that they posed. As a scholar and producer interested in equitable pathways for young people into arts learning experiences and careers, I am struck by the powerful skills that creators acquire even through activities that are play-based. A balance of joy and rigor is, in fact, a design principle that YR Media always strives for in creating programming that draws engagement and delivers outcomes young people can leverage for future opportunities in education, workforce participation, and overall well-being for self and community.

This brings me to another stand-out finding from the 2022 survey. More respondents reported learning an arts subject by means other than classes—for example, through friends or family, or by teaching themselves—than by formal lessons. This finding resonates with reflections from YR Media participants.

“I definitely learned a lot of art skills on my own,” said Iliana Garner, a 20-year-old college student from Chicago. “I used to take classes, but I feel like I hadn't learned as much as I have just in my personal time through YouTube or even through friends.” She described meeting up at a boba shop with a friend, who demonstrated figure-drawing techniques while they sipped their teas. “I learned a lot from that experience,” Garner said.

Other young people spoke about keeping journals, producing music, or even utilizing social media in targeted ways to access the kinds of arts experiences they were after. “You can train the algorithm for Instagram,” said Ashleigh Ewald, a 21-year-old college student from Georgia. “All the things you share and actually give hearts to, it will show more into your feed.” As a result, poetry and book excerpts would appear alongside other posts from friends and brands, she said, “which is so helpful.”

While young people appreciated the opportunities for self-directed arts learning enabled by digital and social platforms, they also observed downsides. “I think because most of your community is online now, it can be really easy to see other people just producing a bunch of stuff really quickly, and it's hard to not kind of compare yourself to that,” one YR Media creator admitted. “Like … why haven't I finished or produced more?” Ewald has observed that constant access to technology can sometimes “hinder” people’s motivation to create or consume art beyond what’s at their fingertips, on their phones, “so it limits that creativity in their mind.”

This final observation speaks to the importance of media arts organizations that support young creators’ self-directed exploration, peer-based experimentation, mentorship from artists they can relate to, and programming that blends fun and skill-building, meeting them where they are and stretching them beyond their starting points. Another YR Media participant noted: “There's a lot of hurt in the world right now… And I think that a lot of people are turning to art.” We turn to art to navigate and digest pain, the participant said, “to express things in ways that are different. And that's definitely been the case for me.”