How to Write an Artist's / Project Statement

An artist statement is a general statement for professional review of what your work is about. It can be a project statement about a particular body of work.  It is not grandiose, and filled with empty expressions and clichés.

Piece your thoughts together!

Make lists of what you do and why you do them

Describe your decision making process and or unusual process / media you might explore

How do your concepts connect to the world at large?

Keep it short and to the point

Maximum word count 200

Use simple language

Write in the first person

Tips in assisting you in your writing

Ask yourself:

“What are you trying to say in the work?” “What influences my work?” “How do my methods of working (techniques, style, formal decisions) support the content of my work?” “What are specific examples of this in my work” “Does this statement conjure up any images?”

Artist Statement samples

BIO writing

In the Spring term when your exhibition is on view, you will also prepare a biography which is also 200 words that lists where you are from, a short description of your career as an artist / student / internship and your major accomplishments.  It might also include what you plan on doing following graduation.

SHORT ARTIST STATEMENT: MILLIE WILSON

I think of my installations as unfinished inventories of fragments: objects, drawings, paintings, photographs, and other inventions.  They are improvisational sites in which the constructed and the readymade are used to question our making of the world through language and knowledge.  My arrangements are schematic, inviting the viewer to move into a space of speculation.  I rely on our desires for beauty, poetics and seduction.The work thus far has used the frame of the museum to propose a secret history of modernity, and in the process, point to stereotypes of difference, which are hidden in plain sight.  I have found the histories of surrealism and minimalism to be useful in the rearranging of received ideas. The objects I make are placed in the canon of modernist art, in hopes of making visible what is overlooked in the historicizing of the artist.  This project has always been grounded in pleasure and aesthetics.

Project Statement written by the curator from the Everson Museum of Art's 2017 exhibition 
Monumental:

JEN PEPPER

Initiated by a history grounded in fibers, my drawn and constructed three dimensional works explore intersections between the body, the world, and the making of language. My works depict temporal processes that cannot be fixed and are virtually impossible to harness; weather patterns, water currents, land shits, steam, and lines that author textual language, each in suspended activity. Objects and ideas extend endlessly outward. Permanency remains on the move and may unravel and reconstitute at any point. Nothing is ever permanent in these parts. Disparate ideas come together in attempts to witness potentiality; stasis and buoyancy; mimesis, semiotics and cerebral abstraction. Forms and ideas are caught between states of having been, to just this side of becoming. The flatness of a picture plane gives way to spatial illusion once a mark is drawn upon it. The distance between the surface tension of water and a knit sweater is simply time.  My work’s interconnectedness speaks to evolutionary processes as much as to revolutionary ones.