By Rebecca Friedman
Washington, D.C.- - The National Endowment for the Arts put out a national survey of outdoor arts festivals that found adults with children prefer taking their children to arts festivals rather than museums and other art related activities.
“Most people who had children at home brought them,” Carole Rosenstein one of the two women hired to write and conduct the study said.
Out of the seven case studies performed for the survey, all but one case study site said “more than half of survey respondents who live in households with children brought children to the festivals. In some cases, the percentage was very high: approaching 100% at Santa Fe Indian Market and 82% at the Houston International Festival and Lowell Folk Festival,” according to the survey’s executive summary.
Rosenstein explains that the preference over arts festivals to museums or galleries comes from a comfort level. “It is not someplace you’re going to be told to be quiet.” With an outdoor arts festival children can learn and experience the arts without being restricted by rules.
The study found that what attracted families to arts festivals was “the ability to enter and leave programs, to get up and move around, and to make noise and dance, renders festivals especially attractive to families with younger children.”
“A family could go to one event to another without being pinned down,” Sally Gifford a spokesperson for the NEA said. “The venue allowed them to pick and choose.”
“We had a ton of family friendly activities,” Danielle Piacente a spokesperson for D.C’s “Arts on Foot” arts festival said. Last year’s festival had over 10 activities designated just for children, which did not even include the live music.
Children are not the only ones that benefit from festivals. Artists benefit from having children present as well.
“It changes the relationship between the artist and the audience in a positive way,” Rosenstein said.
Children asks artists questions and they dance to the music that musicians play. Artists can see their work being enjoyed and are able to interact with their audience. Artists become enthused when they see children’s “enthusiasm about asking artists questions,” Rosenstein said. Children “don’t know they aren’t suppose to get up and dance” and so it creates a special relationship between the audience and the artist when they see the children dancing to their music.
The NEA put out the survey on October 29th and it was entitled “Live From Your Neighborhood: A National Study of Outdoor Arts Festivals.” The survey took over six months and was conducted over 1,400 festivals.
The survey “came out of a recognition that we had never done a survey about arts festivals in the past” Gifford said.
According to Rosenstein the NEA needed to conduct a survey because they helped to fund these arts festivals.
“It’s part of their mandate to know about what they fund.”
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