Noah Scalin, a multimedia artist living in Richmond, Virginia, had never heard of the South Carolina town of Lake City before looking online for arts festivals where he could show and sell his work. What caught his eye about ArtFields, at the time an eight-day town-wide visual arts festival in Lake City, was the best-in-show grand prize of $50,000. “I thought, ‘wow, that’s better than most other shows I enter,’” and he promptly submitted a stickers-on-panel work titled Of America: The Problem We All Still Live With, based on a Norman Rockwell 1964 image of Ruby Bridges integrating an all-white elementary school in New Orleans flanked by federal marshals. That artwork didn’t win the grand prize—he won it the following year with his stickers-on-panel Of America, September 4, 1957, which was based on photographic images of the integration of the high school in Little Rock, Arkansas—but it did propel his career trajectory. He was offered a solo exhibition that year at a Lake City art space, given another solo show at a gallery in North Charleston, and the painting itself was purchased by billionaire Darla Moore, the wealthiest person ever to hail from Lake City.
Moore did not get rich in Lake City, located in eastern South Carolina, approximately 80 miles from the state capital, Columbia. After graduating from high school, she left for college at the University of South Carolina, then earned an MBA at George Washington University before heading to New York City, where she moved up through the ranks at Chemical Bank and eventually started a Wall Street investment company, Rainwater, Inc., with her husband, Richard Rainwater. Called by Forbes “The Toughest Babe in Business,” her specialty was turning failing companies into profitable ones, a skill she later applied to revitalizing Lake City, an agricultural town of 6,000 whose main source of income, tobacco, had declined amid nationwide reductions in smoking.
Her goal was to turn Lake City into a place where people would want to go rather than leave, which meant improving prospects, particularly for younger residents. Working with the local public schools, university and technical college, she invested millions to convert an old Walmart into the Continuum regional education center, where students may earn advanced placement credits, welding certifications and mechatronics training. She also developed scholarship programs that expand access to higher education across the state.
“ArtFields was designed to reimagine my hometown of Lake City and restore our community’s belief in itself by transforming into a living art gallery,” Moore told Observer. “The response has been beyond anything we imagined. Thousands of people now travel from far and wide to attend the festival and our year-round programs. Most importantly, young people who had left Lake City are coming back home because they see a future here for the first time in a long time.” (This isn’t her only philanthropic effort in the cultural sphere. Most recently, Moore made an unrestricted gift of $25 million to the Shed, the cultural center in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards that commissions, produces and presents a wide range of visual arts, performing arts and pop culture. In recognition, the Shed is renaming its level two gallery the Darla Moore Gallery.)
Going from eyesore to destination meant giving Lake City a purpose, and the arts have become the headline attraction. Artworks from the festival are placed in local shop windows for months at a time, so that much of the town looks like an art gallery for a good part of the year. The U.S. is full of towns and cities that were once prosperous until their biggest employer closed up shop and left, leaving residents and local and state officials scrambling for ways to revive things. Does Lake City offer a model for the rest of the country? Asked more broadly: can the tourist industry replace actual industry, and can the arts lead the way?
The record isn’t fully clear. Perhaps the most notable example of an arts project leading an economic development effort is MASS MoCA—the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art—in North Adams, at the northwest corner of the state, which opened in 1999 with $60 million in state funding. The idea was to turn the abandoned Sprague Electric factory complex into a multi-arts center that would draw tourists: visitors who, many of them coming to Berkshire County during the summer months when Tanglewood, Jacob’s Pillow and the Williamstown Theatre Festival are in full swing, would eat at local restaurants, stay in local hotels, shop at local stores and generally spend money that would benefit the local economy.
MASS MoCA itself has proven to be a success, drawing 160,000 visitors annually, but the hoped-for revitalization of North Adams has been harder to identify. The downtown storefront occupancy rate is little changed from when the museum first opened. North Adams’ current unemployment rate of 6.9 percent, just above what it was when MASS MoCA opened, remains stubbornly above the state average of 5.1 percent, and its public schools’ rate is considerably below the state average in reading, science and math proficiency as well as high school graduation rates. Joe Thompson, MASS MoCA’s first director, lived in North Adams but sent his children to public schools in the neighboring city of Williamstown through a school choice program.
The most visible repurposing of a rural site into an arts hub is probably Marfa, Texas, a quiet ranching town that has become a much-lauded global arts hub primarily thanks to minimalist artist Donald Judd, who, when he moved to the area from New York in the 1970s, repurposed abandoned military buildings for to create space for massive installations, which eventually led to high-end art tourism, boutique development and cultural investment that now attracts tens of thousands of visitors annually.
Then there’s the repurposing of the Bethlehem Steel factory in Pennsylvania, which ceased steel production in 1995. Its large campus has since been turned into an arts and entertainment district, with free music, films, art displays, a casino and a National Museum of Industrial History that has created jobs not only within the 65,000-square-foot complex but in the surrounding community.
There are numerous ways to make the arts an attraction, one of which is designating areas of town as cultural districts—and there are hundreds of them around the country. Texas has 35 such districts, Louisiana 83 (22 in New Orleans alone), Iowa 34, Massachusetts 35, Maryland 24, Rhode Island 9 and New Mexico 7. There are others in California and New York, where the Fort Greene area of Brooklyn is a cultural district. The Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Americans for the Arts currently puts the number at “500+,” while the National Association of State Arts Agencies tallied more than 1,000. These designations do not themselves promote economic activity, but they point tourists to areas of possible interest.
Somewhat harder to chart is whether these districts have succeeded in revitalizing previously underutilized areas of town and generating new business activity. Louisiana, Rhode Island and Maryland exempt fine art from the state sales tax within arts and culture districts and artists in these districts are not required to pay state income tax on the sales of their artwork within the districts. The Louisiana legislature, faced with a budgetary shortfall, ended its tax exemption in 2025 after a seven-year run, suggesting that the benefits did not outweigh the drawbacks. In 2013, Rhode Island’s 1998 law was amended to permit artists throughout the state—and not just those living in a cultural district—to forgo the state income tax on artwork sales taking place within the state. The plan, modeled on Ireland’s national income tax exemption for the first €50,000 of profits or gains from the sale of their work by writers, composers, visual artists and sculptors who live and work in that country, is intended to encourage artists to move to or remain in Rhode Island.
The arts district in the one-time blue-collar city of Pawtucket, Rhode Island, was sited where 23 unoccupied textile mill buildings stood, with the idea that it would attract artists and creative-sector companies to the mills. That has happened, but those loft spaces have also attracted people who work in Boston, where rents are much higher. Herb Weiss, former economic and cultural affairs officer for the city, noted that “the arts district was an effective marketing tool to pull artists and developers to the city.” Information on how many artists have moved to the city and whether their presence has stimulated economic growth is “anecdotal at best,” according to Jason Pezzullo, commerce director for the City of Pawtucket. “We’ve seen $1 billion in new investment over the past 10 years. Some of that may be due to the tax-exemption, but it’s something I wouldn’t know how to measure.”
Evidence that the arts, in particular and tourism, in general, can stimulate an economic turnaround is more anecdotal than data-driven—perhaps best described as aspirational. “The evidence base is weak, but the rhetoric from arts advocates is great,” said Douglas S. Noonan, a professor in the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University who has studied cultural districts. Designating an area as an arts and culture district generally “doesn’t move the needle in terms of employment or reducing poverty or increasing the tax base,” although it sometimes increases property values.
“Arts and tourism aren’t a one-to-one replacement for the legacy industries that once anchored many communities,” said Stephanie Fortunato, director of special projects at the Global Cultural Districts Network, an initiative of the New York- and London-based AEA Consulting. “But they can diversify local economies by activating networks of public and private partners with shared interests. In communities facing disinvestment and job loss, where historic buildings need new uses after manufacturing has declined, this can be a stabilizing force.”
She noted that “many communities invest in artists and creative businesses as part of a comprehensive economic development strategy.” The elements of this often include adaptive reuse of vacant and underutilized buildings, support for resident artists and small businesses, stronger civic participation, creative use of public space, downtown revitalization, preservation of diverse cultural traditions, improved access to arts education and increased tourism. “In that mix, cultural districts are effective policy tools because they can advance multiple aims at once.”
The focus on increasing tourism is based on the idea of attracting outsiders who will invest or spend money, leaving the town more prosperous. However, the jobs most associated with tourism are service positions, which are generally minimum-wage, part-time and without benefits. Noonan believes a better approach is to “develop activities, such as arts activities, for locals. Make your community nicer to live in,” so that others will want to visit and live there, too.
ArtFields proved to be a success right away, but Randy Wilson, consulting architect for Lake City, said “the question we asked ourselves was how can we convert Lake City from being just an art festival to being a year-round destination.” Making the town itself a work of art was key to its transformation. “What unifies people are three things—music, food and art—and we have followed that path.” He noted that in 2011, two years before ArtFields held its first festival, “storefront occupancy was 20-30 percent. It’s 90 percent now, and the people inside have full-time, benefited jobs.” He added that the goal for Lake City is to be self-sustaining, with a workforce that stays rather than leaves, and that much of his current focus is on building additional housing units for the approximately 6,000 people who call the town home.
Over the course of 20 years and together with other community members through the Greater Lake City Alliance, Moore took over and began renovating downtown buildings, creating hotels, restaurants, a bookshop, barbershop, florist, salon, a bakery, a gift shop, three nonprofit art spaces and even a recording studio—the type of establishments that visitors would patronize during the ArtFields festival and throughout the rest of the year. ArtFields itself seeks out professional artists, but the town also created a juried art competition for school-aged children, ArtFields Jr., as well as a free summer art camp. “The goal is exposing young people to art,” said Carla Angus, ArtFields’ program director since 2021, who was born and raised in Lake City. “More students participate in the arts and want to make art. They are not intimidated by art, because they feel it’s for them.”
Meanwhile, Noah Scalin is back in town, now Lake City’s artist-in-residence, where he is working with community members on an outdoor 30-foot-long “interactive sticker mural.”
