Thinking out loud
about place.

Oh hey. Hi. Thanks for being here, maybe again or for the first time!

I've got something on my mind and I need to get it out because that is apparently how I function. You've been warned.

There is a new report… a genuinely good one, from the Center for an Urban Future. It's called New York's Creative Spark and it's a full data look at the arts and culture economy across every region of New York State. And the Capital Region numbers?

Arts and culture jobs here grew 50% over the last decade. The overall job growth in that same period? 3.7%. The artist population grew 43.5% while the overall regional population grew 2.9%. Artists, actual working artists, are the reason the Capital Region isn't a population decline story right now. The creative economy is quietly holding this region together while everyone looks the other way.

As I dove into the numbers, I realized… I'm not in it. Like, at all. And neither are most of the people I know and work with and run into at art openings and markets and First Friday.

So who actually IS in this data?

The study uses Bureau of Labor Statistics job categories. Graphic designers, art directors, interior designers, fine artists, craft artists, animators, fashion designers. The "arts and culture sector" counts performing arts companies, theaters, museums, galleries, independent artists and performers.

Which is real! Which matters! Which is also a very specific slice of something much much bigger.

Because here's who I'm actually thinking about:

• The illustrator who works at a tech company by day and has an Etsy shop at night.
• The UX designer with an MFA building startup interfaces AND doing editorial illustration on weekends.
• The copywriter whose entire job IS creative… words, concepts, brand voice, but whose W-2 says "communications" so she doesn't exist in this data.
• The video game artist.
• The writer who writes for work AND has three chapters of something real in a Google doc she opens at 11pm when the kids are asleep. (redacting the whole "art after everyone else is taken care of" rant)
• The brewer whose whole thing… the label, the taproom, the lighting, the entire vibe… is an artistic vision living inside a category that says "beverage manufacturing."
• The antique dealer who is essentially a curator without a museum's overhead.
• The person who refinishes furniture and styles it and sells it every weekend on Facebook Marketplace hoping to open a store.

None of them are in this study.

The data can only count your primary occupation as it appears in labor records. So if your W-2 says "marketing coordinator" and you're a working ceramicist selling at the Troy Waterfront Farmers Market every Saturday… you do not exist in the creative economy. The hustle doesn't count. The dream doesn't count. The thing you do because you absolutely cannot not do it… doesn't count.

Ya following?

I genuinely think the creative economy is twice the size anyone is measuring. Maybe more.

OK and now I have to say the tech thing.

Arts and culture workers in the Capital Region earn $42,500 on average. The private sector average here? $80,900. That's not a gap. That's a canyon.

AND. NEA funding to the Capital Region dropped 82.5% in ONE year. One year! NYSCA's operating support is 37% below its 1989 peak adjusted for inflation. The governor's proposed budget would cut it another 25%.

Meanwhile… and I say this as someone who works in tech, uses tech, believes in tech… the economic development dollars flow very differently when there's a software pitch deck involved. Workforce pipelines. Venture attention. Development grants. Biz Review Headlines.

I am not anti-tech. At all. But I am asking: why does creative work, which is building community, retaining population, revitalizing downtowns, drawing people to a place, get treated like a charity case while other sectors get treated like an economic engine?

Both are economic engines.

And then there is AI and I cannot fully redact this one.

(redacting approximately seven feelings simultaneously)

I use AI tools every day. I find them genuinely exciting AND genuinely unsettling in ways I am still working out… and I say that as someone who has been talking about emerging technology since before most people knew what a browser was. I teach workshops on this stuff. I believe in these tools.

AND.

The tools that could most powerfully amplify a working artist's practice are arriving at exactly the moment the safety net under those artists is being systematically dismantled. At the same time. On purpose or not… it doesn't matter. The collision is real. I don't think we're talking about that enough, either.

AI is a tool powered by human ideas… I wrote that once and I still mean it. It hasn't walked in your shoes. It has no backstory. It cannot attend your opening, shake your hand, or feel what it feels like to make something from nothing and have someone else feel it too.

But the people who CAN do those things are earning $42,500 a year and can't cover a $400 emergency.

That's the part I can't get past.

So what am I in all of this?

(redacting entire midlife pondering rant… you're welcome)

I have tried a lot of titles. None of them fit right. I walk a line between tech and arts every single day and honestly? Both sides occasionally give me a look like I'm trespassing.

And I GET it. I do. But the line I walk is exactly where the most interesting things are happening. And I think a LOT of us live there… in the gap between categories, between industries, between the thing we get paid for and the thing we can't stop doing at 11pm.

Here's what I think I actually am: a concert promoter.

Not literally… though I was once, and I was good at it. (redacting music industry era rant)

The skill never left. I just changed what I was promoting. Now it's the creatives I work with, or the creative work I consult on, or old buildings that deserve a second chapter. Artists whose work should have a bigger room. Stories about women and working people that got skipped in the official record. The amazing creatives I work with and promote. Historic places that are economic engines waiting for someone to build the experience around them. Events that need someone to say: this matters, show up, here's why.

Find the thing that deserves an audience. Build the stage. Make the connection real.

That's the whole job. Always has been.

So what do we DO with this?

Read the report. Seriously… share it, talk about it, send it to your local elected officials. The numbers are real and they matter and this region should be loud about them.

And then ask the question the report can't ask: who else is doing creative work that nobody is counting?

Because I bet you know twenty people right now. The Etsy shop. The manuscript. The taproom vision. The 11pm Google doc. The refinished dresser on the curb with a price tag.

They count too. Even when the data doesn't know how to find them.

I don't have grand conclusions here. I just have a lot of feelings and a strong belief that someone should say this out loud.

So. Here I am. Saying it.

Thanks for reading all the way down. You're my people and I appreciate you more than I say.

… Michelle
(redacting the part where I tie this up neatly because I genuinely cannot)