The Art Style Each State Googles More Than Anywhere Else

An analysis of over 2.2 million Google searches reveals the art movements Americans are most drawn to - and Nebraska may be the biggest surprise of all.

Every state has its own cultural identity - but does that extend to art preferences? To find out, Crib of Art analyzed Google search volume data for 185 art-related keywords spanning 65 distinct art styles and movements across all 50 U.S. states.

Rather than simply ranking which styles get the most raw searches (spoiler: Abstract and Pixel Art dominate everywhere by sheer volume), we calculated an "over-index" for each state - measuring which art styles residents search for at a disproportionately high rate compared to the national average. The result is a map of America's true artistic obsessions, and the findings say a lot about regional culture, history, and identity.

• Georgia searches for Folk Art at 12.9x the national per-capita rate - more than any other state-style combination in the country

• Nebraska is 7x the national average for Dadaism, making it the unlikely capital of avant-garde art interest

• Texas, Montana, and Utah all over-index heavily for Western art, while Arizona, Colorado, and North Dakota gravitate toward Southwest art

• Florida, South Carolina, and Delaware prefer Coastal and Nautical art

• Pennsylvania's signature style is Mural Art, driven by Philadelphia's world-renowned mural program

• Vermont, Maine, and Nebraska rank as the three most art-obsessed states per capita

Georgia Is America's Folk Art Capital

No state over-indexes for a single art style quite like Georgia does for Folk Art. With 9,950 monthly searches - driven almost entirely by the keyword "folk art" - Georgia's per-capita search rate is 12.9 times the national average. For context, California, a state with nearly four times Georgia's population, records just 1,600 monthly searches for the same term.

The explanation likely lies in Georgia's deep connection to Southern folk art traditions, from self-taught artists of the rural South to institutions such as the High Museum of Art's folk art collection and the region's long legacy of folk pottery.

Nebraska's Bizarre Obsession With Dadaism

Perhaps the most unexpected finding in the entire dataset: Nebraska searches for Dadaism at 7 times the national per-capita rate. The state logs 1,180 monthly searches for Dada-related terms - a volume that rivals states with five times its population.

Whether this reflects an unusually strong art curriculum, a local cultural institution, or simply a particularly curious population, Nebraska's disproportionate interest in the early 20th-century avant-garde movement stands out as one of the dataset's most striking anomalies.

Regional Identity Shows Up Loud and Clear

Some of the most intuitive findings in the data are also the most statistically significant. Art search behavior closely mirrors regional culture and geography.

The West Loves Western and Southwest Art

Texas leads the country for Western art searches with 2,640 monthly queries (2.6x the national rate), followed by Utah (2.4x) and Colorado (2.8x). Montana also over-indexes heavily for Western art at 3.7x - though as a smaller-population state, its figures appear in the small states section below. Arizona takes the crown for Southwest art at 6.4 times the national average, with Colorado (3.0x) not far behind. Note that the main table reflects each state's single highest over-index: Colorado's top style is Southwest, even though it also over-indexes for Western.

The Coasts Search for Coastal Art

Florida's signature style is Coastal and Nautical art, with a search rate 2.1 times the national rate across terms like "coastal art," "ocean art," and "beach paintings." South Carolina (1.9x) and Delaware follow the same pattern.

Native American Art Dominates the Pacific Northwest and Plains

Oklahoma (2.5x), Oregon (2.3x), Washington (2.2x), and Minnesota (1.7x) all over-index for Native American art - reflecting the significant Indigenous populations and cultural institutions in these states.

The Unexpected Outliers

The data is most interesting where it defies expectations. Beyond Nebraska's fixation with Dadaism, several states show surprising art preferences.

New Mexico searches for Performance Art at 6.8x the national rate. With 1,300 monthly searches, the Land of Enchantment's interest likely centers on its thriving contemporary art scene in Santa Fe and the legacy of institutions like SITE Santa Fe.

Pennsylvania's signature style is Mural Art (3.0x). Philadelphia's Mural Arts Program - the largest public art program in the country - almost certainly drives this. The city has produced over 4,000 murals since the program's founding in 1984.

New York over-indexes for Outsider Art (2.0x). The state that houses the world's most prestigious galleries shows its strongest disproportionate interest not in blue-chip contemporary or Impressionism, but in art created outside the mainstream art world - a fitting counter-cultural twist.

Iowa is the Land Art state (4.8x). With 400 monthly searches, Iowa's interest in environmental and earth-based art movements outpaces the national rate. Ohio (3.2x) and Wisconsin (1.6x) round out a Midwestern Land Art corridor.

California's signature is Lowbrow/Pop Surrealism (1.8x). Born in the Los Angeles underground art scene of the late 1970s, the Lowbrow movement has deep roots in California's car culture, surf art, and counterculture comics. The data confirms it's still California's most distinctive art interest.

America's Most Art-Obsessed States

Setting individual styles aside, which states simply search for art the most? Using total art-related search volume normalized by population, the rankings reveal that smaller, culturally active states punch well above their weight.

• Vermont - 9,742.6 searches per 100k residents

• Nebraska - 3,657.0

• Maine - 3,441.9

• North Dakota - 2,720.9

• New Mexico - 2,700.6

• District of Columbia - 1,848.4

• Wyoming - 1,362.9

• Iowa - 1,223.3

• Indiana - 1,192.3

• Mississippi - 1,183.5

Vermont's commanding lead - nearly three times the second-place state - is driven by consistently high search volumes across a wide range of art styles rather than dominance in any single category. Maine and New Mexico also reflect states where art is deeply embedded in the local culture and economy.

At the other end of the spectrum, Virginia (55.7 per 100k), New Jersey (91.6), and Illinois (94.7) rank as the least art-curious states by this measure.

The Full State-by-State Breakdown

*New Jersey's 0.7x figure indicates it searches for Western art below the national average. Western is listed here as its relatively highest-ranking style, though no art style shows a meaningful over-index for the state.

States with populations under 1.5 million are listed separately below due to higher statistical variability in smaller search pools.

Small State Curiosities

Smaller states often produce the most dramatic over-indexes - but with lower raw search volumes, these results should be taken with a grain of salt. That said, several are genuinely fascinating.

Vermont over-indexes for Lowbrow/Pop Surrealism at a staggering 20.7x the national rate. The state's thriving independent arts scene and proximity to major New England art institutions may fuel this niche interest.

DC searches for Asian Art at 12.6x the national rate - likely driven by the Smithsonian's Freer and Sackler galleries, which house one of the world's most important collections of Asian art.

Maine is 8.2x the national average for Contemporary Art. With a creative economy that represents a significant share of the state's GDP and institutions like the Portland Museum of Art, this tracks.

North Dakota over-indexes 9.1x for Southwest art - an unexpected result for a Northern Plains state.

Hawaii shows a 2.3x over-index for Japanese Art, reflecting the state's deep cultural ties to Japan and significant Japanese American population.

Rhode Island leads the nation in Fauvism searches (4.0x), potentially influenced by the Rhode Island School of Design's renowned art history program.

Wyoming gravitates toward Romanticism (3.3x) - the 19th-century movement known for its dramatic landscapes and celebration of nature, which feels right at home in the state that contains Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons.

Other small states: Montana (Western, 3.7x), South Dakota (Nature Art, 3.4x), Delaware (Watercolor, 0.9x), Alaska (Renaissance, 1.1x), New Hampshire (Native American, 1.7x).

The sharpest divide in the data may be the simplest one: Vermont, with the highest per-capita art search volume in the country at 9,742.6 searches per 100k residents, sits at one end of the spectrum; Virginia, at 55.7, sits at the other. That's a 175x gap between the most and least art-curious states - and it has nothing to do with population size.

Methodology: This analysis was conducted in February 2026. Crib of Art used the DataForSEO API to pull Google Ads search volume data for 185 art-related keywords across 65 distinct art style categories for all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. Keywords were grouped into parent style categories and aggregated by total monthly search volume per state.

To identify each state's "signature" art style, we calculated an over-index score by comparing each state's per-capita search rate for every style against the national per-capita average. A score of 2.0x means that the state searches for that style at twice the national rate, adjusted for population. Styles with fewer than 100 monthly searches in a given state were excluded to reduce noise from low-volume fluctuations. States with populations under 1.5 million were analyzed separately because of greater statistical variability.

Population data comes from the 2023 U.S. Census Bureau estimates. Total dataset: 2,208,440 art-related searches across all states and keywords.

Media inquiries can be directed to info@cribofart.com.