Is it possible to be a working-class artist in NYC anymore?

Being a working-class artist has become increasingly difficult in New York City, where living costs are at record highs, rent keeps rising, wages remain stagnant and half the population struggles to meet basic needs.

On Thursday, Hunter College’s Office of the Arts will explore how working-class artists are hindered by their lack of financial access and are under-represented in the arts at “We The People: A Forum on Working-Class Artists in America." The event will also discuss ideas for how to make the arts more accessible to all.

“We're not getting a picture of America,” said Gregory Mosher, the executive director of the Office of the Arts and a theater producer. “What happens to the culture when we don't hear from everybody, when all the love stories are told through the perspectives of the middle or upper middle class, and all the political stories are told through the lens of a reasonably privileged person?”

He said some of our country’s fragmentation can be traced to this lack of representation.

“You know how much resentment has built up from people who don't feel seen or heard,” Mosher said. “It's made America less healthy, this lack of diversity.”

The free event ran out of tickets quickly and is now waiting list only. Video recordings of the panels will be posted online.

Mosher, who has been at Hunter since 2017, called the fact that the event had fully booked so quickly surprising, but not terribly so. Its topic is urgent and relevant, but isn't widely discussed because talking about money remains taboo within many artistic circles.

Ahead of Thursday’s forum, Mosher spoke with Gothamist about the challenges working-class artists face in New York City. An edited version of the conversation is below.

What makes NYC in 2025 so uniquely challenging for working-class artists?

There are many reasons: It could be the flatlining of the economy for the past 50 years – you know, working people aren't making any more money and yet prices go up for everything.

It could be the creation of the MFA programs, which sort of started in the 1970s. Some are older, of course and some are newer. But that's when you start to see it and [attending an MFA program is] a handy shortcut if you're looking to publish a book or produce a play or choose a dancer. You can just go with the MFAs from the five best MFA schools and let the chips fall for everybody else.

Even when there's scholarships, it's hard to get into an MFA program. There’s only a few people in a playwriting cohort, even fewer in creative writing.

And you’ve got to go for the interview and you have to pay the application fee. And these are things that reasonably privileged people can afford. But 50 bucks is a lot of money for some people. You're gonna apply to six schools? That’s $300.

We're all for these MFA programs. We admire all of them. In fact, Hunter has superb MFA programs for about the 10th of a price to go to Columbia. But are those [MFA grads] the only people we want to hear from? That's the real question.

What happens to a culture when working-class artists can’t be heard?

We're not getting a picture of America. What happens to the culture when we don't hear from everybody, when all the love stories are told through the perspectives of the middle or upper middle class, and all the political stories are told through the lens of a reasonably privileged person?

If there's anything we've learned in the last 20 years, it’s that there's a whole lot going on in America that has not been terribly clear until recently to people who live in coastal cities or big urban areas.

You know how much resentment has built up from people who don't feel seen or heard. It's made America less healthy, this lack of diversity.

It’s like economic diversity has been forgotten even as enormous strides have been made for many other kinds of demographic representation.

We're going to begin Thursday with a clip of JFK giving a speech in 1962. And in that speech he says, “Art is the great democrat, calling forth creative genius from every sector of society, disregarding race or religion or wealth or color.” We just dropped the wealth part.  It got lost sometime between 1962 and 2020.

The progress on gender and race has been really significant in the last 10 years. I looked up the 10 most produced playwrights of the 21st century: Five were women, only three were white. That's fantastic progress.

But I would bet a nickel – which is the most I ever bet – that no one is sitting around saying, “Do we have any working-class people on our staff? Is there anybody who comes from that world who can tell us what a good ticket price is?”

I hope one of the things that comes out of this is that arts organizations, particularly not-for-profit arts organizations, start looking at the question of access.

And how does the lack of working-class artists affect New York City?

Well, it's terrible. I mean, think about working-class artists. You know, Dorothy Allison, James Baldwin, John Steinbeck. You know, just go down the list of those people who changed our lives because we read their books or we saw their paintings. We don't have those anymore.

Who's gonna write “Go Tell It On The Mountain” now? Or more to the point, who's gonna get it published?

Maybe they get created, but they don't get out into the world because today's Tennessee Williams doesn't have an MFA and he doesn't know anybody with any money and he doesn't have any connections.

Any ideas for solutions?

You know, do we need another performing arts complex or do we need another Westbeth [an affordable housing complex for artists]? I would say we need another Westbeth more than we need another performing arts center.

But look, I'm not an economist or a sociologist. I'm just a theater producer.

The good news is we don't need to get a bill through Congress to go make all of our arts organizations and our publishing houses better, we can just decide to do that and be more representative of the enormous variety of experiences in America. But we also need government,  real estate; we need money.  But you know, the city gives more money to the arts than the NEA does.

And we should do it because it's the right thing to do and we should do it because it'll make for a healthier society.  I mean, this is gonna kill us, this fracturing.