Across the United States, access to sustained, high-quality visual arts education is deeply shaped by race, income, and geography. Low-income Black and Brown communities are disproportionately impacted by arts program cuts, underfunding, and structural segregation within public education systems. These disparities influence not only who gains artistic skills, but whose creative identities are nurtured, recognized, and supported over time. By pairing stakeholder commentary with contextual data and research, PARTHENON aims to make visible the structural conditions shaping arts education while resisting the abstraction of lived experience into statistics alone.
“Persons of color represent 68% of NYC’s population but account for only 34% of the creative workforce.”
FreeArts NYC, “Why is Matters?”
PARTHENON 