Applying for Visual Artist Grants or Fellowships

Nothing to Fear!

Having a few visual artist grants and fellowships under my belt, I'm always amazed at how intimidated other visual artists are by the application process. My hope is that this article will demystify the process a bit for artists that might be in this position. The writing part of a grant proposal is actually very secondary to a visual artist's grant or fellowship application process. Writing plainly and coherently, however, can tip the balance sometimes on whether or not the proposal receives funding.

Aside from having received a few artist grants, I've also had the privilege of being on a jury review panel. The experience is very insightful to say the least. I urge any visual artist to take the opportunity to serve on a jury review panel if given the chance.

It would make sense that the written part of the visual artist grant or fellowship is secondary to the submitted imagery. The grants do after all fund visual arts, not literary arts. The top priority then, is the visual artist's imagery. More so, applying involves thinking about image organization a major priority.

Most applications require digital images for the most part with a specific size and resolution format. In a visual artist grant or fellowship application, one of the most important things is to follow the application guidelines as precisely as possible. In this instance, not formatting files correctly can get application rejected before the jury review panel ever gets a chance to see it. Precision is also important to the written part. For now, however, I'll talk more about organizing digital imagery for the visual artist grant or fellowship application process.

One of the things that I did when I applied for my first grant was to visualize how the jury review panel would view my images. I imagined a darkened room with a slideshow running. Serving on multiple jury review panels since then, I've found that this is indeed the case. In most applications, the visual artist has control of how the images are numbered. This control is a huge benefit, but one that I realize a good number of visual artists are not fully conscious of when putting together applications.