Resources for Artists: How to Write An Artist Statement

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CAPTION FOR THE VIDEO ABOVE:

Hey, friends, I’m here again to talk to you about stuff that I think will maybe help you. So hopefully it does. I’m going to Dive Right In. Because so January/February is talking about goals and ways that I’m like helping myself and ways that I’m finding opportunities as an artist. And I thought that for March, I would talk a little bit about the tools that I use that help me do all the artists things.

So for this video, I want to talk about kind of an extension from think it was last week or the week before where I was talking about the call for entry website and submitting application for residency. So part of submitting an application for a residency is writing an artist statement, and I don’t know about you, but that was really hard for me to do. I consider myself much more of a visual artist than a writer. So writing an artist statement was a struggle. I feel like I’m not as strong of a writer as I am an artist. And I think that with the way that we are required to submit applications for people to look at our art to consider us for opportunities, we have to know a lot about writing in order to submit those applications. So, I feel like that automatically kind of, like, cuts out a whole lot of people that may or may not actually be wonderful artists, they just struggle with writing.

So, in order to hopefully, help more people have more opportunities as an artist. I want to talk about the resources that I use to help me write my artist statement, because hopefully it will help you too. I feel like a lot of us want our artwork to speak for itself and most of the time, it does. But sometimes in order for the right people to see it, we have to write the right things too. And not just have the right images or paintings or visual or whatever art is. So here we go.

This is how I wrote my artist statement. Well, this is the resource I used to write it. Your artist statement is going to be very different than mine. And the way that you write it is going to be unique to you and your art, but the resource that I have found and used to write a lot of these things is the getting your shit together website. They have a book too, I think, when I was in college, they had us buy the book and use the book as part of one of my art classes. And then I learned later on that they also have a website with a whole bunch of resources for artists. So this getting your shit together website is very different from the call to entry website. The call to entry is for artists to submit their applications for opportunities and like to find opportunities. The getting your shit together website is like all of the kind of back-end stuff that artists need in order to be able to request those opportunities. So, like how to write an artist statement, how to write an artist resume, a whole bunch of stuff like that. Like how to find…

I just got really distracted by a really cute bird out of my window! Okay, sorry.

So I use the getting your shit together website as a resource for how to write the artist statement, because I was like, I don’t know. I don’t know what to write. I don’t know how to write it. I don’t know what is expected to be in it. I don’t want to write it incorrectly and then they just like throw out my application for this residency. So this website has all the information that you would need in order to write something like an artist statement. Like, for instance, I learned that artist statements are written in first person. So you say like, I me my… that kind of thing in the artist statement. And then of course it has like in the first section, it should say something like this and the second section you should include these things, and the final part you should do this. So it kind of gives you an outline of the types of things you would need in an artist statement, which will help you write your own based on what your artwork is.

Yeah, artist statements are really hard. So yeah, I don’t make this video way too long and I have told you most of the really important information and in order to not repeat myself a lot of times because I think I’d do that… I’m just going to share the link to the getting your shit together website below, and it has a whole bunch of resources for artists in that way. Like, writing artist statements, writing your resume all that kind of thing. So, yeah. I hope it helps you, it definitely helped me. Yeah, I hope you have a wonderful day. I’ll talk to you soon. I love you! Bye!