Memphis College of Art
BFA Artist Statement Workshop
Prof. Ellen Daugherty
The artist statement that you write for your Memphis College of Art BFA show must
focus on two important aspects of your BFA work: FORM and CONTENT.
1) FORM: Explain to your audience the artistic (formal, visual) choices that you have
made in your work.
* Form and content should be intertwined. Connect your discussion of formal elements to
your discussion of meaning. Your artistic choices are the ways through which you convey
your message(s).
* Your discussion of form will probably involve some description of the work itself. Don’t
overdo it.
* Use art vocabulary appropriate to your media and techniques.
* Weed through your formal choices and talk about those that are most important to your
content. You do not have to tell us what every single color symbolizes.
* Note to all illustrators, animators, and filmmakers: Even if you think of yourself as a
storyteller, and you have an urge to use your artist statement to talk about nothing but the
plot and characters in the story you are telling, stop yourself. You need to discuss visual
choices. The visual choices you make support the content of the work.
* Note to designers: Even if you have the urge to spend most of your time discussing your
user-based research, stop yourself. You need to discuss your visual design choices. The
design choices you make support the content of the work.
* Note to animators, photographers, filmmakers, and others using computer programs or
other highly technical software or hardware: Does your audience really need to know the
software (or the specific type of equipment) you used to make your artwork? If so, I
recommend discussing why that particular software (or hardware) helped you get the look
and the content that you want. Don’t just tell me you used Final Cut Pro 7 for Mac. That’s
too insiderish and doesn’t actually help me to understand why you used 40 jump cuts in
three minutes.
* Note to sculptors, painters, printmakers, and others working in mixed media, collage, or
installation: Give your audience a sense of the variety of media, materials, and techniques
that you are using and why. But don’t feel that you necessarily have to tell your reader
every single detail about every single material or medium or technique you use. Once again,
weed through to pick out the most important things that support your content.
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2) CONTENT: Explain to your audience what your work is about and why it matters.
* Form and content should be intertwined. Connect your discussion of formal elements to
your discussion of meaning. Your artistic choices are the ways through which you convey
your message(s).
* Discuss the big idea(s) present in your work and connect them to the formal choices that
you made.
* The content of artworks is often very personal to the artist and/or was born from
personal experience(s). However, you need to try to connect to an audience that is not
inside your head, does not have the same experiences, and may not care that much about
you. Think about ways to express your content through the articulation of big ideas, rather
than through personal anecdote. Even though you made a work that is based in your
experience as an Army brat who moved to a new place every year, you may make better
connections to your audience if you discuss the work from the perspectives of “dislocation,”
“transition,” or “loneliness.” Do your best to leave out or reduce personal
anecdotes—>“When I was twelve my pet Dalmatian died and I was left adrift on a sea of
personal tragedy and pain.”
* Reduce or remove jargon and pretentious academic language. The content needs to be
comprehensible to an average reader/viewer with limited knowledge of art and theory.
* On the other hand, be careful of sounding too chatty. You are graduating from college!
Avoid sounding as though you are a 12-year-old speaking with friends at the mall.
* You don’t have to explain every possible meaning or go through every plot point in a
narrative. Be selective. Tell your audience what you need to tell them in order to clarify the
big idea(s).
* Be careful of comparing yourself to other artists or artistic movements from the past.
You may cite influences on this particular work, but if you say that your work is surrealism
or that you are the direct artistic descendent of Jasper Johns, you are probably just showing
us your art historical ignorance.
* This is your artist statement, not a research paper. I don’t need to know that Tristan
Tzara was a Romanian-French Dadaist poet whose work inspired the Beat Generation.
Mention that you were inspired by Tzara and tell us how you were inspired by him, then
move on. Designers may be required to discuss their research more extensively than others,
but they should not neglect the discussion of design/visual choices or meaning.
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GENERAL NOTES FOR EVERYONE
1) Your BFA artist statement should be focused on the work(s) that you will be exhibiting
in the show.
* Although you may wish to mention that this specific work is drawn from a body of similar
works that you have been making, or that this specific work includes a theme or themes
that you have been developing in your final semesters at MCA, nevertheless you primary
purpose is to write about the single work or series of works that will be in the show.
2) Do not write using conditional language. For example, do not write: “My illustration will
show a leopard.” This is the language of a proposal, not a final artist statement. By the time
the statement is read by your audience, the work should be finished. So write in past or
present tense. “My illustration depicts a leopard.”
3) Do not write in passive voice. For example, do not write: “The work was made using
watercolor and embroidery on canvas.” Passive voice divorces you, the maker, from the
object or image that you have made.
4) It is OK to use first person! In fact, first person allows you to write in an active voice and
to claim ownership of what you have made. So: “I made Untitled # 325 using watercolor and
embroidery on canvas.”
5) Write your statement in the proper format including font, spacing, and margins from the
beginning! If you do so, you won’t get a nasty, sob-inducing shock when your advisors tell
you that you must cut it.
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