Creative Economies Workshop Series: Artist Statements

Creative Description for Artist Statements

An artist statement is piece of writing by you that helps the audience access or understand your artistic work. Artist statements are often required for exhibition purposes, grant applications, teaching position applications, fellowships, and more. They direct an audience to the concerns you consider to be important in the artwork, and help publicists, curators, and critics write about the work. Pulling from different writing practices varying from Ekphrastic poetry to food reviews, we will move through different writing exercises to craft an artist statement that includes vivid examples of existing artwork, in order to bring our labor to life in the eyes of our readers.

Learning Outcomes:

• Introduce descriptive writing strategies
• Populate artist statements with vivid examples
• Develop working draft of an artist statement
• Explore professional uses and applications of artist statements

Instructor:

Stephanie Bursese has worked with numerous national and local foundations, institutions, funders, and international artists as a collaborator, organizer, and project manager. She has taught in higher education for the last 20 years and has extensive experience working within and around academic systems. She served as Program Manager for the Philadelphia Area Creative Collaboratives initiative, a $750K Mellon Foundation grant project (2017-2020), as a Grant Writer for We Are the Seeds (2020-2023), and is currently a Co-Director & Curator of the Pew-funded project “Teaching at the End of Times”. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Florida in Photography/Art History and a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Syracuse University.

As an artist, Bursese uses photography, sculpture, textiles, and site-specific installation to investigate perspective, memory, and trust. Her work has appeared in numerous group and solo exhibitions, publications, and museums-nationally and internationally-including The Aperture Foundation (NY), The Print Center (PA), Expo Chicago (IL), Cornell University (NY), Galerie Maison Kasini (Montreal), Everson Museum of Art (NY), Silver Eye Center for Photography (PA); and The University of Virginia (VA). She is represented in both private and public collections. She was selected for a residency at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in 2006. In 2013 she self-published her first book of photographs Razor Thin Rock Hard and released her second book, Belt and Brace, in 2015; in 2017 she was nominated for the MACK First Book Award. Bursese has been an artist member of Vox Populi Gallery for the last 11 years-she lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

See more of her work at www.stephaniebursese.com

Host or Publisher Vox Populi