Promoting your art is a key part of developing your career. Get it right and it will lead to more opportunities. If you don’t let people know what you are doing, your career is likely to progress more slowly.
It’s important to manage your time around promotion. Otherwise, you could spend all your time promoting your work rather than making it.
Consider promotion from two angles.
- The promotion of specific events (e.g. An exhibition opening, talk or workshop)
- Ongoing, day-to-day promotion to remain visible in the art world. This makes people aware that you’re out there, making work.
There is crossover between these two types of promotion. For example, inviting people to an exhibition also demonstrates an active practice.
Promoting exhibitions and projects
Project specific promotion might look like
- Sending invites out to private views
- Contacting press about exhibitions
- Promoting your events on social media
- Inviting people to talks
Listen to artist Laura Eldret talk about promotion and marketing specific projects.
Ongoing promotion of your practice
Ongoing promotion might look like
- Showing work in progress on social media
- Presenting work at peer mentoring sessions
- Talking to people about what you’re up to at private views
- Sending out newsletters to your mailing list
Listen to artist Rosalind Davis talk about ongoing promotion
Who are your audiences?
By audience, we mean anyone who might engage with your work. This could be
- Visitors to your exhibitions
- Collectors who buy your work
- Other artists who are familiar with your practice
- Friends and family
- Gallerists and curators
- Followers on social media
- non-art specialists with an related interest in your practice
Watch this recorded conversation with artist Helena Hunter and Pablo Colella of Disconnected Bodies about reaching audiences online.
Promotional toolkit
This list below shows things that are all useful in promoting your practice. They are also useful for other things like applying to opportunities.
Promotion tips
- Maintain a list of active contacts within useful subgroups. Mailchimp offer an easy to use, free way of managing this. These could be
- Private view invitations
- press releases
- invitations to your studio to keep updated on new work; residencies etc.
- Research and keep copies of articles by writers you might like to contact in the future. Gain an understanding of what interests each one.
- Keep clear records of any sales of works. This is useful for your mailing list. Network in your peer group.
- Have business cards with you at all times and hand them out in an appropriate manner.
- Maintain a comprehensive ‘Master CV’ with everything you’ve done. You can customise this when presenting CVs for particular opportunities.
- Collect any quotes and notes about you and your work. Always get permission from the author
- Keep copies of all photographic documentation, articles, reviews and catalogue essays.
Avoid doing the following:
- Don’t send images or emails to strangers. They end up deleted or with a polite but negative reply. and may damage your future chances of making genuine contact later.
- Hijacking other people’s private views. These are not your opportunity to land a show at the venue yourself. An informal ‘hello’ or chat with the curator / director which you can follow up later is ok though.
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