Digging Deeper into Arts Vibrancy

Read the Arts Vibrancy Index

After a brief hiatus, SMU DataArts, the National Center for Arts Research, is proud to once again release the Arts Vibrancy Index Report in its seventh iteration, celebrating arts-vibrant communities across the United States even as they grapple with the ongoing realities of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Each county has an overall arts vibrancy score indicated by the colors shown in the legend, made up of weighted scores on the measures found along the left of the map. Each of these measures are scored akin to percentiles – i.e., if your county has a score of 56, it means it did better than 56% of communities on that measure. There are just over 3100 counties in the country, so scoring 90 means there are about 310 counties that ranked higher.