Artist Application Documents: What Goes Into the Package and How to Put It Together

An artist’s package of documents is a set of four texts and files that introduce you to the professional world: a biography, an artist statement, a CV and a portfolio. Think of it as the artist’s passport: it is how you are identified wherever people do not know you personally.

This is often where the difficulties begin. Some artists put off assembling it until they “have something to show”, and miss open calls because of it. Some put everything into a single file and send a gallery a twenty-page life story. Some confuse the biography with the artist statement and write about the same thing twice. All of this can be solved once you understand what each document is there to do.

Let’s take the package apart piece by piece: what it consists of, what job each element does, in what form it all gets sent, and how to keep the documents up to date so that you do not have to assemble them from scratch before every application.

Contents

• What the package of documents is for and when you will need it
• Bio: a short biography in the third person
• Statement and CV: two different jobs
• Portfolio: the visual part of the package
• Assembly and upkeep: how to keep your documents ready

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What the package of documents is for and when you will need it

The principle is simple: the package of documents speaks about you when you are not there. A curator, a gallerist or a selection committee reads the files first and only then, if they are interested, talks to the artist.

You will need it for literally everything:

• approaching a gallery and proposing to work together;
• taking part in an open call, a competition or a festival;
• applying for a residency;
• applying for a grant or a bursary;
• preparing an exhibition — the curator needs your texts for the press release and the wall texts;
• being published in the media — the editors will ask for a bio and a portfolio.

A practical conclusion follows from this. The package is put together in advance, not for a particular application. Otherwise an interesting open call with a deadline three days away turns into a scramble, and documents produced in a rush come out worse than they could have been.

One more thing that is easy to forget: the person reading your application is a real human being with limited time. They may open the file between meetings, on their phone. So links have to open straight away, files should be no heavier than they need to be, and texts should be readable in minutes. A lyrical story of ten thousand characters works against its author here.

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Bio: a short biography in the third person

The shortest document in the package, and the most underrated. A biography is three to five lines in the third person that introduce you as a professional.

What goes into it: your name, year and place of birth, education, and the city where you live and work. Residencies, significant exhibitions and gallery representation, if you have it, are sometimes added.

An example of wording that works: “Maria Ivanova was born in 1995 in Leeds. She graduated from art school with a degree in painting. She has taken part in group exhibitions in Manchester and Bristol. She lives and works in London.”

What should not be in a biography. Themes, mediums and reflections on the meaning of art — that is what the artist statement is for. Epithets such as “a talented young artist” — that judgement is not the author’s to make. A chronology of your whole life — a biography is not an autobiography.

It is useful to keep two versions: a short one of three lines for announcements and captions, and an extended one of a paragraph for applications and catalogues.

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Statement and CV: two different jobs

These are the two documents most often confused, although they answer opposite questions.

The artist statement answers the question “what are you about?” It is a text about your artistic position: which themes you work with, why those in particular, by what method and in which mediums. The length is 120–150 words. People read it before looking at the works, to understand the lens through which to view them. We have covered how to put one together in detail in a separate piece on the artist statement.

The CV answers the question “where have you already been?” It is a factual list: education, solo and group exhibitions, residencies, art fairs, awards, publications, collections. No descriptions or judgements, just the year, the event, the place, in reverse chronological order. A detailed breakdown, with the format for entries, is in the piece on the artist CV.

A simple test that you have not mixed anything up: if you can take every fact out of the document and it still makes sense, it is a statement; if the facts cannot be taken out because there is nothing else in it, it is a CV.

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Portfolio: the visual part of the package

The portfolio is the centre of the whole package; it is the reason the other documents get read at all. It is a PDF of 15–25 pages that brings together your works with correct captions, with your contact details, bio, statement and CV at the beginning.

The key requirements in brief: PDF only, up to 25 MB, one to three works per page, a single caption template for all the works, good-quality photography with no retouching of the background. The full version, with layout examples and a list of typical mistakes, is in the piece on the artist’s portfolio.

On the website. A personal website is a good addition to the package, but not a replacement for it. It works as a shop window and a way in, yet a file still goes into the application: a website does not guarantee the structure that whoever is doing the selecting expects to see. And a separate point: a website should not look like a catalogue with price tags — a price list is a separate document and a separate conversation.

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Assembly and upkeep: how to keep your documents ready

A single style. All the files in the package are formatted in the same way: the same fonts, the same margins, the same approach to headings. Inconsistency reads as carelessness even when the content is strong.

Two versions: digital and printed. The digital one, in PDF, is for emails and application forms; the printed one is for meetings and art fairs, where documents are sometimes asked for on paper.

Editable source files. Keep not only the PDF but also the files it was built from: for each application you will have to shift the emphasis, and sometimes cut the package by half.

Regular updates. The rule is simple: every significant event — an exhibition, a residency, a publication — goes into the documents within a week. Otherwise, before applying, you have to reconstruct dates and titles from memory, and some lines are lost for good.

An outside view. Before your first serious application, show the package to a colleague or to someone from the art world. You stop seeing your own wording, while a fresh pair of eyes finds in ten minutes what you have not noticed for a month.

And the main thing: a package of documents does not have to be impressive; it has to be honest and well put together. At the start, everyone’s is short. What matters far more is that the four documents do not contradict one another and together add up to one recognisable artist.

Open your files and check: do the biography, the statement and the CV describe one and the same person, or three different people?