How to Apply

I have been searching online to find places to send my portfolios. Personally, I feel that sending portfolios to galleries is a total waste of time. I've been working in galleries now for a long time, and if you saw how many portfolios a gallery receives you would understand. Whether you come in personally, or you mail your stuff, it all goes in the box. Then after a year (a year of your portfolio floating in limbo) a staff member pulls out his or her three favorites and shows them to someone important. Out of those three, the director will pick one if the director is looking to take on a new artist. Chance of making it into a gallery by sending in a portfolio, 1 in 1000 if lucky. Galleries don't want artist portfolios, they want to find artists outside the gallery and bring them in.

I think I am going to go the contest route. I have seen the "juried contest" work several times before. I aided in two juried contests, and I know that hundreds, if not thousands of artists send in. However, the jury usually is picking at least ten artists. On top of that, they will send back your portfolio after the jury is over, so if you do not make the contest at least you can resend your portfolio.

There are a few slide places I intend to send to, registries as they are called. NuruteArt (www.nurtureart.org) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn is a good one. The idea there is that they take just about anyone's slides into a registry, and then they invite curators to submit proposals for show concepts. Once a curator's concept is accepted they pick the artists but only out of the NurtureArt registry. Another one that I like is art.com. Art.com allows artists to post 16 images for free on their website, in hope that someone will be interested in buying a poster of your work (you receive 10% of poster sales). While the poster thing seems a bit cheesy, the posting of work for free sounds pretty good, and poster selling most likely brings people in.

Today is my first “all-studio” day, though most of it will not be sent in the studio. I want to send a lot of stuff out today and a lot of requests for prospectus and a lot of SASEs. All this promo stuff is pissing me off just sitting at my house; this stuff has to go out. Any artist that reads this blog please post a response. I am interested in what other artists do to promote their work, as I am sure others who read this blog are.