A study of more than 4,400 nonprofit arts organisations across ten US cities has found a stark pattern: cities whose local arts agencies increased funding after the pandemic saw stronger financial performance and higher attendance. Cities that cut back saw their arts sectors contract.

The report, published on 29 July 2026 by The Art Newspaper, draws on data from SMU DataArts — a research centre at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, also known as the National Center for Arts Research. It covers the period 2019 through 2024, bracketing the pandemic and its aftermath. The ten cities examined are Atlanta, Cleveland, Des Moines, Houston, Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Sacramento, and Seattle.

The finding is blunt in its language. Increased municipal arts agency funding — money a city government channels to its cultural organisations through grants and programmes — is directly linked to strong financial performance and higher attendance. Declining support, the report says, is associated with "financial contraction, evidenced through declines in revenue and tightening bottom lines" (The Art Newspaper).

Phoenix is the standout. Local arts agency support there rose from 0.85% of arts organisations' budgets in 2019 to 4.2% in 2024 — a fourfold increase. Jen Benoit-Bryan, executive director of SMU DataArts, said Phoenix "really rebounded much more than other cities" and pointed to that level of local support as the reason.

Sacramento followed a similar path. Its Office of Arts and Culture increased support from just under 5% of cultural organisations' budgets in 2019 to over 8% in 2024. Atlanta's Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs, which covered about 1% of cultural organisations' expenses in 2019, also increased its support substantially by 2024.

Philadelphia tells the other side of the story. Its cultural agency budget saw the greatest contraction among the ten cities studied, falling from covering 7% of expenses in 2019 to 1% in 2024. Per-capita grants to cultural organisations dropped from 10 cents per resident to a single cent. The report does not isolate a cause for Philadelphia's withdrawal, but the link to sector contraction is consistent with the broader pattern.

The study builds on earlier SMU DataArts work tracking how federal COVID-19 relief money flowed into the arts. A 2024 report from the centre found that eleven local arts agencies distributed a cumulative US$100 million in federal recovery funds — money from the State and Local Fiscal Recovery Funds programme, a pandemic-era stimulus mechanism — to arts and cultural groups. That earlier study noted that unprecedented levels of federal arts funding reached nearly every community in the country during the pandemic.

What the new report suggests is that when those federal dollars ran out, the cities that stepped in with their own money kept their arts sectors growing. The ones that didn't, didn't. For anyone who cares whether their local museum, theatre or community arts centre keeps its doors open and its audiences coming, the lesson is close to home: follow the city budget line, not the mission statement.