“Art is the great democrat, calling forth genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color.”

John F. Kennedy, 1962

“Lincoln used to say that democracy was a system that allowed you to arrive at your level of talent and discipline. A lot of people don’t feel that anymore. This is where class comes in…you wonder how much talent is out there and the system doesn’t let them rise.”

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin

A healthy democracy’s culture would reflect the widest possible creative perspectives of its citizens. But for the past fifty years, working class American artists—Black and white, urban and rural, men and women—have found it increasingly difficult to propel their voices into the national conversation. There are many reasons for this, and it is of course only a part of the larger national economic and social problem facing the working class. But diminishing these creative voices has exacerbated our well-documented cultural disconnections, distorted our sense of a national identity, limited opportunities for community building through empathy, and held us back from that ever elusive goal, a more perfect union.

We the People: A Forum on Working Class Artists in America will bring together artists and arts administrators, policymakers, economists, scholars, elected officials, students, and journalists in a series of panel discussions to explore the financial and social barriers that artists from working class backgrounds face, the commonplace inaccessibility of arts events to working class audiences, the financial and social price of the arts not representing the culture at its fullest, and what solutions we might begin to find.

This forum is, to the best of our knowledge, the first of its kind in the United States, and we hope it will be the beginning of an urgent national conversation.