Keep it short and sweet and leave the reader excited to see your work!

Who is your audience and how are you going to connect with them?

Try free writing, imagine you are writing to a friend, a family member, write in 2-3 min increments without looking back at what you’ve written. You can use these later as starting points for your real statement.

If you are more comfortable speaking, record yourself and then transcribe what you said.

Try reviewing your sketchbook or research notes, in the future when you are in the studio or have a conversation about your work that is helpful, write it down!

If you are still stuck, read or watch other artists talk about their work (Art 21 has great short videos). Try to find artists approaching similar ideas. 

A good proposal is clear and easy to read and anticipates the reader’s questions 

The language we use for writing about art is oddly pornographic: We know it when we see it. No one would deny its distinctiveness. Yet efforts to define it inevitably produce squeamishness, as if describing the object too precisely might reveal one’s particular, perhaps peculiar, investments in it. Let us now break that unspoken rule and describe the linguistic features of IAE in some detail.

IAE has a distinctive lexicon: aporia, radically, space, proposition, biopolitical, tension, transversal, autonomy. An artist’s work inevitably interrogates, questions, encodes, transforms, subverts, imbricates, displaces—though often it doesn’t do these things so much as it serves to, functions to, or seems to (or might seem to) do these things. IAE rebukes English for its lack of nouns: Visualbecomes visuality, global becomes globality, potential becomes potentiality, experience becomes … experiencability.