THE GRAND MYTHCreating Your Portfolio
When one buys some of my artwork, I hope it is because they will wish to learn from it and not because they think it will match their drapes!
—CHRISTIAN CARDELL CORBETT
Increasing your opportunities through meeting potential collaborators, supporters, grantors, curators, patrons, publishers, and so on, demands a special vehicle to show your work. It is essential that you create a portfolio that reflects who you are, your accomplishments, and the depth of mastery of your craft through the collection of the work you have produced.
The following provides helpful hints in creating a portfolio. This is not an exhaustive list but a general treatise of how to create and present a portfolio. I also include the dos and don’ts, and helpful hints for artists in any stage of their career. When you approach grantmaking foundations, they may have a particular manner in which they want to see your work. These guidelines will help you produce an industry standard from which you can deviate, as in the case of a specific funder’s requests.
THE GRAND MYTH
“Artistic genius gives a person license to be wacky, crazy, and eccentric.” Let’s dispel the myth right now. Those may be facets of your persona, but when you are in business mode—and that’s what grantseeking and the public showing of your work is—you have to present a credible demeanor. You are building credibility and a rapport with the reviewer from the very first contact, introduction, or page of your portfolio. You are also trying to get noticed among the many portfolios that are being reviewed.
The tone, message, and impression you are aiming to present to anyone who is being introduced to you and your work should be organized, professional, and mature. Anyone looking at a sloppy, disorganized portfolio will quickly disregard it. Reviewers of all disciplines and situations want to know that you are ambitious, qualified, and prepared. If you submit a portfolio or collection of pieces or writings that demonstrates this, the reviewer will immediately conclude that a mature, seasoned artist is on the other end.
Art in all its disciplines breeds competition, and the best way to get noticed is to present a well-rounded image of an artist who is creative and has a business sense. This is not asking you to sell your creative soul or wear a suit. But it is certainly more than showing a few pieces of your work. The portfolio we will create will be complete and cover all aspects of who you are.
ELECTRONIC PORTFOLIOS
We live in a modern and virtual world, and even in today’s art business we use computer technology to present our very physical and visual work. Creating a physical portfolio is still a basic need. Even with hard copy portfolios, you will include a CD that has everything virtually laid out and a business card with your Web site address, if you choose to develop one.
And even though it seems like you are doing twice the work, an electronic portfolio draws from images and documents that you have already produced for the hard copy portfolio. Your hard copy materials and originals are still necessary, as many gallery reviewers and grantmakers still rely on slide images that can be projected to their judges and patrons. Also, as you progress in your career, you will be presenting your work to many entities and the cost factor can be minimized with the use of electronic portfolios when allowed. The following list describes each component and how it is adapted for the electronic portfolio.
If you are a “poor artist” without the means to produce an electronic portfolio—or for that matter even a basic hard copy one—check your arts community for support resources. Fortunately, given the increase in arts funding over the last few years, there are agencies that help artists develop these materials. If you live in a community without such supports, identify organizations and businesses that you can barter with to create these pieces.
COMPONENTS OF PORTFOLIOS
The various components of an art portfolio include:
* Cover letter
* Résume or curriculum vitae
* Reference letters
* Artist statement
* Work samples
* CD-ROM
* Business card
* Exhibition brochures
* Clips from print media
* Audience feedback or quotes page
Cover Letter and Résumé
I like to present a cordial but professionally written cover letter that has one paragraph introducing myself and the portfolio. Your cover letter should also give a list or table of contents for the components of the portfolio, and sign off with a grateful thank-you to the reviewer for considering you and your work.
Letters of Reference and Recommendation
I like to include letters of reference, as they are like frosting on a cake. I use the actual letters versus only a list of names and contact information since the letters are more immediate and the reviewer doesn’t have to request these and have the lag time to wait for them to arrive.
Naturally, the letters will be glowing and wonderful, so for these to be taken seriously they have to be sincerely written and reflect the writers’ true summation of you and your work. Include up to three letters of reference, unless you are asked for more. Typically, the pools of people you draw from are colleagues, mentors, academic professors, and seasoned or well-known artists in your field who know and trust your work. Try to avoid familial contacts, clergy, and your best friends unless these people have history that pertains to you and your work. You want to have at least one reference from a person who has known you the length of your career and who can speak to your depth and artistic evolution. Noteworthy artists in your field may be helpful, but you may not have these and if you do, the relationship may not be strong enough to ask for a reference. Dig a bit and see whom you have forgotten, or whom you may be too timid to ask. There is no harm in asking; if they can’t help, they will usually decline gracefully.
Remember in some review processes, phone calls are made in addition to the reference letters presented, so avoid people you have just met, as they really won’t be able to speak at length about your ability.
A Statement from the Artist
When people review your art, you want them to understand and appreciate it. Although you cannot control what another sees or feels when experiencing any form of artistic expression, you still need to present enough information that will hook the reviewer into learning more.
An artist statement is simply a personal statement about you and your work. It is a written statement for the hard copy portfolio and can be adapted for the electronic portfolio and presented in many creative ways.
For many of you, the idea of having to write a statement like this may be a great hurdle, yet this is your first and most important hurdle. Using the following exercise, what you write will translate into what you also say about yourself and your art. In applying for grants, there is much more legwork, meeting, talking, and discussing what you do, well before any written application. These exercises are multipurpose and since getting grants involves meeting reviewers and judges, and writing and sending applications, this statement will help you summarize the overall information that you want to convey through your art.
This exercise is a simple approach to writing a personal statement that is only a few paragraphs long. You will only need about 250 words. Don’t worry—you can do this. In fact, you will probably write more than that, and much of the exercise will be in editing the statement.
Think of it as the written form of you sitting with a friend in a bistro or café, waxing realistic about your accomplishments and why you are doing your art. It is brief and concise, because you are not giving them the grand show in this statement. It is merely a way to introduce you and your art. It is a combination of résumé biography, philosophy, artistic approach, and boasting. Anyway, power up the pen, paper, or computer, and let’s get started.
Starting Point—Hooking the Reader
I try to give strong declarative statements (remember those in English class?) about the process that I work from. This may be one sentence and because of its assertive tone, you will immediately grab their attention and begin gaining credibility. They sit up and say, “Whoa—this is an artist who knows where he is headed.”
Description of Your Style: Try to write three sentences that describe your artistic style. How do you create your art, your technique, and what is it made from? Example:
The poems, prose, and essays that I write come from themes of everyday life, with special attention given to relationships and the ever-present foreigner in a strange land. I like to use a narrative form, as it carries stories well although I don’t use it intentionally. My process is still one of simple observation, capturing mood, moment, and mindfulness of life’s instances. Over time, the ironic and witty voice has come through some of the darker shadows of an emerging artist in self-reflection.
Philosophy and Approach: Write two sentences about your philosophy and one sentence about your approach. Why do you create your art, and what does your art mean to you? Example:
Like John Adams, who once said, “You are never alone if you have a poem in your pocket,” I have always relied on poets to nurture, encourage, and comfort me along the journey. In the same way, now as I feel fortified and able, I hope to provide the same counsel and inspiration.
Poems mean a lot to me. They are nearly like a meditation and oftentimes they are the only language I find myself using to interpret my world. Although that may be rather personal, I see myself as a bard singing out praise and hope. Given my nomadic wanderings, I have come to realize that my writing is a witness to the human condition.
Influences: Mention formal education (if applicable) and/or artists (need not always be from your discipline) who have influenced you or better yet mentored you. Example:
I am self-taught, although these last ten years I have enjoyed the guidance of poets on the page and poets, writers, and teachers in my community whose counsel and mentoring has encouraged my development—David Gergen, John Caddy, Joe Paddock, John Minczeski, Rick Bass, Trent Alvey, and Terry Tempest Williams, to name a few. Although I am buoyed by many of the classic poets and dead poets like William Stafford, I feel an affinity to contemporaries like Mary Oliver and Billy Collins. In creative nonfiction and deep ecology, I am drawn to the work of many of the writers in the Southwest who keep vigil for a most precious landscape.
Given my current geography, Cairo, I return to ancient teachers like Rumi, Hafez, and Omar Khayyám.
Accomplishments: Sprinkle in major accomplishments by giving examples of awards you have received. Don’t have those yet? Mention places in which your work has been shown and published, and if you still don’t have that, mention the arts organizations that you are associated with and any membership organization. If you have submitted work and it is being considered, mention the places here. The following three samples show artists with many accomplishments and how they describe these.
This sample is taken from a description of the aesthetics emerging from Milo Fine, a world-class musician based in the Twin Cities. This short statement is much more elegant than the basic sample I derived. The statement focuses on motivations and intentions, which is a great point to capture, especially when, as in this case, they can be somewhat abstract. This emphasizes his aesthetic and approach:
Today, Fine remains an aesthetic absolutist who, upon seeing unfamiliar faces in the audience, will indulge fears of being reduced to a novelty act for avant-garde tourists. As a result, he seems to have deliberately estranged himself from the mainstream. “Pop music, by its very nature, feeds on the deeper streams of creativity,” he explains, “and by its very nature, which is parasitical, it doesn’t do those streams justice.” But as Fine suggests, the avant-garde is equally suspect. Having knitted the highbrow in its own image, institutional art is subject to the same pitfalls as any commerce. For Fine, postmodernism is pop writ large, favoring pastiche over depth.
This next sample combines some remarks about accomplishment and musical breadth from Clint Hoover, another musician with unique talents:
One of a select handful of musicians to have mastered both the chromatic and diatonic harmonica, Clint’s work has earned him a place in the Encyclopedia of the Harmonica.From prewar blues to modern jazz, Clint has delved deeply into the musical possibilities of the harmonica. This thirty-year love affair with the mouth organ began as a teenager when Clint stumbled across a Muddy Waters concert at his hometown state fair.
And a third sample shows how remarkable and accomplished some artists are and how they use these accomplishments to tell their story:
The forty-three-year-old guitarist-composer and scholar resists the trappings of precise categorization. William (Bill) Banfield is an endowed chair in arts and humanities, associate professor of music. He is the director of American cultural studies, jazz, and American popular world music studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Banfield received his bachelor’s degree (guitar, jazz studies) from the New England Conservatory of Music, a master’s in theological studies from Boston University and a doctorate in composition from the University of Michigan. In 2001, on invitation from Henry Louis Gates, he served as a W.E.B. DuBois fellow at Harvard University, and in 2002 was invited by Toni Morrison to be the visiting Princeton Atelier artist. That year he completed an opera on the life of nineteenth-century sculptress Edmonia Lewis with collaboration and text by poet Yusef Komunyaka.
The Editor’s Corner
Now it’s time to edit your draft and double-check it to ensure that it is understandable. Here are a few tips for editing. These can be used for anything you write in draft mode:
* Read it aloud and check for the tone. Remember, you want it to be declarative and assertive, without run-on sentences.
* Make the necessary corrections for tone and content.
* Now turn your attention to editing in smaller incremental ways, focusing on your grammar and usage. Go sentence by sentence to make your corrections.
* Now edit for style and punctuation.
* Read it aloud to yourself and see how it sounds. Yep, I said, sounds. Poor writing won’t flow, and anything that is dangling or extraneous will be obvious.
* When you have it all finished, let it sit for a day. Then do the editing exercise again. Don’t worry, this isn’t too much or being obsessive. You are just making sure it has had time to “rest” and this short pause in the process gives you greater objectivity.
* Finally, let someone you know read it. He should be reading a clean copy without any spelling or punctuation errors. Ask him to read it for clarity, tone, and content. His job is to see whether he understands what it is you want to communicate. He is to avoid fussing about anything related to style, as this is an area with great variance.
Putting It All Together
We have written all the ingredients for a great artist statement. Sort of like baking a cake, and the ingredients are as shown in the examples. A few final hints: when you double-check your draft, ensure that you use “I” statements and simple English. Even though many artist statements talk about the aesthetic of their art form in abstract ways, it is best to avoid inaccessible descriptions. Overall, try to avoid using jargon or language that has little meaning. Remember, clarity is a goal here. If you need more practice writing, many Web sites have online help and mini-workshops.
In the short term, you have done it—your first artist statement. It is complete and ready for the piéce de résistance—samples of your work.
SAMPLES OF YOUR WORK
You will be providing samples of your work in both hard copy and electronic portfolios. The following hints will help you choose and present your very best.
Show Quality Work
It may go without saying that you will only show your best work, but it is amazing how many samples have weaknesses that detract from the overall presentation. If you are a writer, make sure what you include is finished perfectly. If you are a visual artist, creating slides and images of your work is vital; try to get these done as professionally as possible. Photographers presenting their work have few excuses for showing work prints or low-resolution prints.
Unless your work is specifically written in another language and you qualify this and/or it is expected, submit in English. I had a client once who wrote an entire application (and sent it) in French, as her work thematically involved a French Impressionist. She received a declining letter but wasn’t sure why!
Send the Right Quantity
For thematic portfolios and review processes that are not looking at an artist’s entire career, fifteen to twenty samples is a good amount. Poetry can be anywhere from three poems to twenty. When submitting short stories, novels, etc., use twenty to forty pages or the first three chapters if it is not too long.
Dance, film, and performance-focused mediums will typically need a tape of about thirty minutes. Music competitions will rely on CDs, tapes, musical scores, and compositions. Also, some music competitions require live auditions, but these are usually well into the application process. In any case, be prepared to perform. In all instances, try to tailor your submission for your audience and give it just enough information without overwhelming it with quantity.
Organize Your Work in a Meaningful Way
For portfolios showing a retrospective of your entire career, organize the work sequentially. If you use names for your collections, that is fine but give dates so the reviewer will see the flow and maturation of your work. With some disciplines, like photography, you may have hundreds and perhaps thousands of slides and images. Different portfolios showing different themes can be developed. Or you may choose the top fifty slides of your career. Being proactive in all of this helps, as you may want to avoid the eleventh-hour hunt for that one slide, that one collection that you know is somewhere in the vast recesses of your studio or storage areas.
For portfolios presented in major themes, show your collections in visually astute ways. For instance, show all black-and-white photos together. Group the images according to their vertical or horizontal direction. Make it easy for the reviewers to sit quietly and look at what you have presented. Avoid making them turn their heads in gyrations to see your presentation. Arrange the presentation in a way that reflects your vision and technical ability with your craft.
For PowerPoint presentations and virtual presentations, minimize the bells and whistles, literally—go easy on music accompaniment. With the slide presentation feature, diffuse and project images at a reasonable speed so the reviewer has a chance to “see” it. Set up and practice the presentation until it is perfect and user-friendly.
Submit Other Support Materials
For artists with exhibitions, gallery shows, performances, plays, etc., provide a copy of the show’s brochure. Any publicity you have in the form of written critiques, newspaper or magazine articles, and interviews can all be presented in a section designated with an appropriate heading, like “publicity,” “audience matters,” or “community feedback.” In the case of art residencies or teaching/facilitating positions, provide some of the remarks and quotes from students in a one-page abstract. Advancing this idea further in a virtual presentation, blend images of the audience or community group along with their remarks. The same applies for performing arts, in which commentary or feedback from the audience can be shown. “Sound images” are also important and you can do wonderfully creative things with music or short commentary.
Packaging and Presentation Counts
How you package your portfolio also reflects who you are. For grant competitions, pay close attention to the dos and don’ts written in the guidelines for sending samples. Many foundations have very specific requirements for presenting your work. Most do not want any staples used and written text must be formatted in a certain way.
For mailing and long-distance reviews, it is a good idea to spend a little extra money obtaining an archival box, which can provide additional security and longevity to your portfolio. Send it special delivery, ensuring that it will get there.
Despite the cost, try to have more than one portfolio, so you aren’t left without something to show when the “big call” comes from another entity wishing to see your work.
Finally, as you put it all together, remember that the people who review your work are fairly astute and are accomplished writers, photographers, designers, and so on. For visual art portfolios, it is important to have white space and allow the “eye” to rest a bit, as your work may be quite stimulating. Similarly, for any written pieces make sure you haven’t crammed too many words into your artist statement, résumé, or other accompaniments. Subtlety and brevity are valued in portfolios.
A MULTIPURPOSE TOOL
As you see, portfolios are vital tools for artists and prepare you for many opportunities to show your work during any phase of your career. As mentioned earlier, portfolios can really be a starting point for networking within your community and can ultimately help you find collaborative projects, art residencies, guest contracts, and, of course, grants.
Preparing for grantseeking involves some personal and professional development, as well as the development of your art.
The more integrated you are within your art, the greater your chance of obtaining a grant.
Getting grants relies on being proactive and prepared.
Begin today on the quest for clarity, self-awareness, and continued discovery in your work of becoming an artist.
BOARD PET PEEVES
Artists who apply for grants without reflecting on who and where they are in their careers as artists.
Incomplete portfolios and sample information.
Artist statements that fail to make a connection between artists’ work, their community, and their development.