• Resources for Artists: How to Write An Artist Statement

    March 5, 2022 /

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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! 

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  • Resources for Artists: How to Find Opportunities as an Artist

    February 26, 2022 /

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    CAPTION FOR THE VIDEO ABOVE:

    Hey friends. Thanks for coming here again to my website. So happy you’re here! Excuse me. Hi. So, in my last Vlog, I talked a little bit about this residency that I’m applying for, by the time this video comes out. I will have already applied, but as I’m recording this I haven’t submitted it yet. I wanted to follow up about it because I think that, or, I’m pretty sure that a lot of people would like to put themselves out there in that way, for opportunities as an artist, but they don’t know where to freakin start at all. And don’t even know how to find these opportunities. So I wanted to share with you where I find them and how you can do it too.

    So there’s this amazing website called CaFE or call for entry. I believe it’s call for entry dot org. And what this website does, is it connects artists with a bunch of opportunities, things like residencies, things like workshops, public art, exhibits, grants, awards. All kinds of opportunities that are geared toward artists. So if you’re an artist and you are like, I really want to put my stuff in the gallery show, but I don’t know where to start you go to this call for entry website and sign up as an artist and then it’ll… you can search through all of the calls and you can search for certain kinds of calls, and if you only want to look for exhibits or if you only want to look for residencies, or if you want to look for anything at all that is potentially available to you. They have all kinds of stuff on there and there’s, it’s constantly being updated. That’s where I found both of the residencies that I’ve applied for. I applied for residency last year that I did not receive, which I was sad that I didn’t get it, but I also can’t expect myself to get everything that I want always. Especially if it was like my first time applying for a residency ever. But that experience applying for residency last year really helped me with applying for one this year because I already had my artist resume created. I already had a lot of like generic kind of responses written out for the kind of questions they would ask for residency. So this one they did have more questions and different questions, but it didn’t take me as long to complete this application than it did for the one that I did last year because I already had a lot of stuff already figured out and put together and I already had kind of figured out a system of how to like figure out what I’m going to even say. So that helped me a lot, just doing it last year, even if I didn’t get the residency, that really helped me to be able to do it this year a lot quicker and easier, and with less stress and less time.

    So back to call for entry. If you sign up as an artist, you can search. And you can also sign up for their email list, which is really helpful because they’ll send out like new opportunities to your email that they think might work for you. And they also, I think it’s the… it’s either the most recent things or the things that are about to be due, like expire in terms of like you have until this date to apply but they’ll send out a whole list of like, here’s a whole bunch of potential things that you could apply for that are due in the next two weeks, or month, or so. Or here’s a whole bunch of stuff that is brand new that you might want to apply for. So you can get emails sent to you of all these potential opportunities and then you can just scroll through your email be like, oh, this one sounds cool and click through and do your thing.

    Another cool thing about the call for entry website is the applications to all of these things like the residencies gallery shows, exhibitions, like workshops all the things, you apply through the website. So not only does it help you find the opportunities, but it also helps you like put yourself in the running for those opportunities. When you apply and say you submit images or something for your portfolio, it’ll have those images in this website already so you can just reuse them for different applications. If you want to use the same photos. So it’s helpful because everything is all in one place. Yeah. It’s been really helpful for me. I think it would be harder to find the opportunities if I was just searching randomly and I probably wouldn’t be able to see as many all in one place if I was just on the internet somewhere else.

    So this website is call for entry dot org, that’s spelled C-A-L-L-F-O-R-E-N-T-R-Y-(dot)-O-R-G. This is not a sponsored post or anything. I don’t think they do affiliates, but I just the site has helped me as an artist do I just wanted to share it with you. Yeah, I hope I get the residency we’ll see! And if not, I’ll take another failure because each failure gets me closer to a success and I learn with each one.

    So, yeah. Hopefully this helps you as an artist. If you’re wanting to get yourself out there. If you have any questions comment below or send me an e-mail, or you can like submit stuff through my survey. I’ll link that below and yeah. I hope you have a wonderful day! I’ll talk to you soon! Bye!

    Click here to check out the Call For Entry website!

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