How to Write an Artist Statement
What is an artist statement?
An artist statement is a not-too-long series of sentences that describe what you make and why you make it. It’s a stand-in for you, the artist, talking to someone about your work in a way that adds to their experience of viewing that work.
Here are a few things an artist statement is not:
- a manifesto
- an art history lecture
- a story about discovering art
- short fiction
- self-psychoanalysis
- a string of adjectives
- a theory of everything you’ve ever made
- a list of your career accomplishments.
When is an artist statement used?
You’ll be called upon to submit artist statements when you apply for residencies, grants, and sometimes, exhibition opportunities. It can direct your audience to the themes you consider important in your work, and helps publicists, curators, and critics write about the work. Writing about your work may also be integral to your creative process. You may be writing about a specific work, group of works, or your body of work developed over a considerable period of time.
Consider the following:
- What are the key ideas, issues, struggles, goals within your work or studio practice?
- What questions does this work seek to answer?
- Thematic focus of work (goal, purpose, intention, exploration).
- Content of work (themes, ideas, subject matter).
- Influences (cultural, historical, theoretical, art historical, personal, biographical)
- Form of work (materials, processes, tradition of work –e.g. abstract, figurative, etc.)
- Describe your process and what the work looks/sounds like, etc
- Who is your audience? It helps to have someone in mind when you are writing.
- How can you clarify what your work is about, how can you make your work easier to understand?
Digging deeper on formulating your artist statement...
Sitting down and writing clear, concise, and compelling sentences about your art is daunting. So don’t start with sentences. Ease your way into it with a writing exercise that feels exciting, or generative, or natural to you. A few suggestions:
- Gather your art in one digital or physical space and really look at it. It’s possible you’ve been zooming into the details so much that you haven’t taken a step back and looked at the big picture in a while. What commonalities and differences do you see? Think holistically about your body of art.
- Write out a list of adjectives that describe your work. Use both visual and tonal descriptors. Be specific and avoid art jargon cliches. If your art follows in the footsteps of minimalism, could you describe it as quiet? Or rhythmic? Is your work funny, raunchy, messy?
- Record yourself describing your art to a friend, family member, or fellow artist. Chances are you’re making statements about your work all the time. Have a studio visit coming up? Record your conversations about the art (with people’s consent), transcribe the audio, and mine it for pertinent details.
- Think about the emotions and reactions you want your audience to come away with. An artist’s intent may have little bearing on an audience’s interpretation, but an artist statement is one of the few places you get to nudge that audience towards your desired result. Do they learn something from your art or make new connections between disparate subjects? Are you trying to make people feel agitated, joyful, incensed?
- Jeopardy your practice. What are the questions you hope to answer in your work?
The Basics
Suddenly, you have a bunch of words describing your art. Now you get to pick the best ones to fulfill the very basic elements of an artist statement: what, why, and (possibly) how.
WHAT → Make sure to state what medium you work in (paintings, sculptures, installation, non-narrative video, durational performance, etc.). It’s amazing how many statements don’t include that basic fact.
WHY → Try not to overthink this one. Look back at your brainstorms and your casual conversations. You make this work because you’re excited about it. What, exactly, are you excited about? Be confident: Your art shouldn’t “hope” or “try” to do something to the viewer, it should just do it. Here is where you can also bring up, without going too far into the art historical weeds, your influences and inspirations.
HOW → If you have a truly unique process that’s important to understand—or one that images can’t accurately convey—briefly describe how you make your work. (Please note: Collage is not a unique process and there’s no inventive way to describe it as such, even if you use the word “juxtapose.”)
The tone that you strike in an artist statement for a local group show should probably be different from an artist statement you write for a $100,000 grant opportunity. Every time you start reworking your statement, remember to ask yourself who or what this particular piece of text is for. Write a basic statement that can serve as the foundation for all future artist statements, but make sure you revisit and reevaluate for each application, exhibition, and request.
In order to truly know how your artist statement will be received, and if it’s doing the work you want it to do, you need to have other people read it.
Have a writer friend read your statement for typos. Have someone else read it for typos. Triple-check for typos!
And most importantly, give the people you ask for feedback enough time to read your statement and reply to you! Statements are hard to write, but they’re good for you. They can help someone gain a deeper understanding of your art, feel more connected to that art and, ultimately, value it. They can make or break an application. And they can help you put words to your practice, giving you the language to understand just what you’re doing and why it’s amazing.