For those of you who aren’t familiar with the artist CV, let me break that down for you! An artist CV is not all too different from a regular CV, though what you write on these only has to do with what’s relevant for your art, nothing else. So here are some steps that you can include in yours.
- Firstly what you will need is your personal information. Your name, artist name if you have one, email, phone number, website, place of birth, where you live and yada yada. Don’t forget to put your organization number if you have one!
- Then you want to list any type of art education or courses you’ve been taking!
- What they mostly will be looking for and what sometimes is viewed in a gallery when you exhibit is a list of previous art exhibitions. (And even upcoming exhibitions can be good to mention.) Usually you would make one column with solo exhibitions – meaning you were the only artist exhibiting, and one with group expos. Mention the year, gallery, city and if the expo had any specific title. Note if the exhibition is jury-rated, meaning a jury picked out the work. It can also be useful to mention the name of your fellow exhibitors if they happen to be Picasso or Banksy. Or maybe just a semi-successful artist!
- Other exhibitions that you may have curated or produced.
- Make a list of your other artist activities. For example if you’ve held workshops or classes, worked in a gallery, as an artist assistant, had an art interview – Whatever you’ve done that’s related to art or useful for the CV in one way or another!
- Have you gotten any commissions for public artworks? List them!
- Also list the public places where your art is being represented if it’s bought but not commissioned. Mention what city, company, museum or similar bought it from you. Or if it’s part of any known collections!
- Did you win a competition? Brag about it! If you participated in any worth-to-mention competitions but didn’t win it might still be of value mentioning.
- Scholarships and culture prizes – name ‘em all!
I’m sure there are more things than these to mention in your artist CV, but this covers a good bit of it. When starting your artist CV, which is required in most applications, you might not have a whole lot to add to it yet, which is completely fine. I personally mentioned everything in the start just to fill it out, but with time it grew and I could start removing for example the expos from my high school graduation. It will make sense what to put on your CV and what to leave out.
So, about getting organized - as I mentioned in my latest "Tips for artists"- keep this updated all the time. I always keep a PDF and a Word document with my CV in English and in Swedish, and whenever something new pops up I make sure to add it to both of them so I can simply add the PDF to my applications when needed.
I hope this is helpful to some of you fresh artists out there! Good luck!