Exhibition press isn’t actually an artist’s press

Something that can seem counterintuitive at first about publicity in the art world is that exhibition press isn’t actually the artist’s press. It’s the institution’s. The story wouldn’t exist without the artist, but it’s the institution’s to tell. The story of an exhibition is not the story of the work. It's the story about the interpretation of the work.

What this means is that when a gallery, museum, or non-profit hosts a show of your art, they’re in charge. They put their name on the press release. They pitch the writers and editors. And they manage the flow of information about the show. Although you’re a part of the story, your part needs to be managed in relationship to your institutional partner.

Why is the artist not the story?

Institutional activities function as the news hook because they usually have the name recognition, an established history of activities that exceeds the artist’s, and the public credibility that attracts attention. There are rare cases where an artist’s visibility is greater than the institution’s, but it’s the exception that proves the rule.

The artist, on the other hand, functions as the content justification for coverage, the reason why the public should care that [X institution] is announcing [Y exhibition]. The museum provides institutional credibility. The artist returns cultural currency.

But, there’s a reason that this is actually a good thing for artists. You want your institutional partner to be the reason there’s a story about you. If this were inverted, it would mean that you stand alone as a bigger draw, and maybe this isn’t the right place for your exhibition. You should be at a bigger venue.

But who tells your story?

This dynamic says a lot about how the story of your work gets told. The institutional (read: curatorial) framing sets the parameters within which the press and the public encounter the work. It builds the rules of legibility for understanding the practice.

This context may be built in collaboration with the curator, through conversations and studio visits leading up to the exhibition, and this is where you, as an artist, have the opportunity to influence the historical record most directly.

You tell your story to the curator. The curator uses their vast art historical knowledge to understand and contextualize your work in ways you may not anticipate. Their perspective adds weight and authority to your practice. The institution’s press team takes this framing and adapts it to language suitable for a press release, which then gets distributed to publications, writers, and editors.

It’s a game of telephone, and while “meaning” is never fixed, most artists have a personal interest in being understood. To be understood, then, depends on your ability to communicate as faithfully as possible your vision.

Your opportunity to tell your story directly to the press comes when writers covering the show ask to talk to you. They’ll want to hear directly from your mouth what you were thinking when you made the work. They’ll interview you, and they’ll interview the curator. What you say will influence the way the story gets written, and how you approach these opportunities can make all the difference in how the public understands your practice.

By the time a piece about the show comes out, you’ve done what you could, but the narrative of the practice has been churned through layers and layers of other people’s interpretation. Curators, press teams, editors, writers. You have little control over what other people say, but the better you can communicate your vision for your practice, the more clearly legible the work is, the better it survives translation.

The hidden opportunity

The institution is limited in this work by what's already available in the public record. The curator works from what’s already been written about you and your work, the work you’ve already shown in public. The documented history of your practice. But as an artist you have access to something no institution ever will: the full context of the practice.

You know about all the works you’ve abandoned. The false starts. The decade of working and reworking the things in your work that create the conditions of legibility for the works you do complete. That interior record is the deepest interpretive framework the work has, and it belongs entirely to the artist. This is where you can create new opportunities for understanding