*Artist’s Statement

Your assignment requires an Artist’s Statement. You could put it in a tab.

Here are some pages with some advice about artists’ statements. You can decide which, if any*, of this advice you might take:

Your Artist Statement: Explaining the Unexplainable
Wiki How’s “How to Write an Artist Statement”
Artist Statement Guidelines–Getting Your Sh*t Together
How to Write an Artist’s Statement That Doesn’t Suck

*You’ll note that some of the advice on these webpages is contradictory. For example, one might tell us specifically to avoid using the first person. Another might suggest that we avoid using the third person. 
The purpose of your Artist’s Statement is to build a bridge from your work (in this here portfolio) and your audience to help your people interpret your portfolio. To do that, you may want to provide some CONTEXT for your pages. That could include

  • the context of the classroom: How do you, the artist fit into the classroom community, and what is your relationship to the assignments you completed here?
  • the context of your life: What is your major? Interests? How are these assignments a reflection of your own beliefs, interests, goals?
  • the context of your journey as a student: What did you learn about while working on these assignments? About writing? About your topic? About yourself as a scholar?
  • the context of the assignments themselves: What actions did you take as you read, wrote, researched, thought, wrote some more, and revised? What did you discover about the best way for you to write?
  • The context of the elements that make up your portfolio: What kinds of multimedia did you use? Beyond simply ticking off the requirements of the assignment, how do you hope these multi-media elements will help your audience understand your work?

And finally, here are a couple of links about a visual artist, Michael Hoag:

Remember that You are the artist here, trying to provide context so anyone who wanders onto your page will kind of find their way around it.

Poster: "Twelve Well-Known Varieties of Chickens

Here is a vintage poster from Wikimedia Commons. It was created by Artemas Ward. It is in the public domain.

Photo by Alexas Fotos from Pexels