Side Arts provides public relations services for a range of call for artists providers and businesses. The most common clients include art organizations, galleries, event promoters, private businesses, local governments, educational institutes, and museums.

Call For Artists Providers

In order of frequency, these are the types of organizations which provide opportunities for visual artists:

1. Brick and mortar galleries – Offer 4-10 exhibition opportunities per year. These themed calls can have topics such as colors, shapes, social issues, medium, and styles. The benefit of showing with a gallery is being able to take advantage of their relationships with collectors.
2. Non-profit art organizations – Offer 2-3 exhibition or competitions per year. The non-profits are typically local arts councils and focused on a specific medium, such as wood, ceramics, or fabric. Exhibition themes revolve around local history, public figures, and community affairs.
3. Online galleries – Private websites offering online only competitions. No mailing of artwork is necessary.Often pay-to-participate and offer small cash awards.
4. Event promoters – Manage annual art fairs. These pay-to-participate vendor events usually include the opportunity for juried prizes. Participation to be juried often costs extra.
5. Residencies – Destinations for inspired art making which may include travel expenses, room and board, studio space, and guided support and experiences. Residencies may be juried or paid. 1) Juried: There are no costs except application fees. 2) Paid: The participant assumes all costs. These provide different levels of services on a fee-based and availability basis.
6. Government institutions – Opportunities provided by city government or state arts commissions. These occur irregularly and are dependent on funding. Funding may come from the city, state, federal, or percent-for-art (one-half of one percent of construction cost for art projects) programs. These are requests for proposals for public works – murals, sculptures, traffic box wraps, storm drain painting, bus stop installations, bicycle rack artwork, public bench artwork, and other short-term and permanent installations.
7. Publications – Magazines, both online and in print. Usually pay-to-participate and ongoing based on publication frequency.
8. Studio tours – Community events where artist studios are open to the public. Run by a local arts council or an independent non-profit organization. Pay-to-participate. Although traffic is not guaranteed, online and print promotion may be offered. The primary benefit is having a reason to clean up and organize the studio annually.

Writing A Call For Artists

Be deliberate and thoughtful whenever you are writing a call for artists. Make sure the artist benefits, fee structure, terms of commissions, timeline, and engagement process are clearly defined. Know your legal rights and be clear about the artist’s legal rights. Give quantitative and qualitative data to back up why an artist should participate.

Learn more at our top-performing guide: How To Write A Call For Artists

Providing a point of contact is important when writing a call for artists. Transparency is important to visual artists and crafters. They trust that we hold our clients accountable for their listings. Providing the relevant information helps establish that the client is not a faceless organization or phishing exercise and, in turn, increases response rates.

Calls For Artists Point Of Contact Information

Most promotion content marketing platforms require three point of contact pieces of information:

• Public point of contact email
• Email for administrative use
• Name for administrative use

Public Point Of Contact

• Where the applicant may ask additional questions about the listing.
• May be general (art@yourbusiness.com) or specific (jdoe@yourbusiness.com).
• Avoid generic or non-domain specific email addresses such as artshow@gmail.com.

Email For Administrative Use

• Where the promotion content marketing platform can contact the listing’s administrator for questions or concerns about the listing.
• May be general (art@yourbusiness.com) or specific (jdoe@yourbusiness.com), but preferably specific.
• The person that manages this email address is often both the person that publishes and promotes the listing, although in the case of some larger organizations, there may be two individuals that divide these responsibilities.
• Promotion content marketing platforms will send this email address information about their account, listing updates, and information on best practices for marketing the listing.

Name For Administrative Use

• This is the person that is most responsible for posting listings and managing the promotion content marketing platform’s account.
• A full name (first and last) is required for account set up and maintenance.
• Although not shown to the public, providing a contact name helps establish transparency and allows to quickly address account issues.

It is challenging to write an effective call for artists. There are many details to think through. Side Arts promotion service provides copywriters and content marketers who help you frame listings and promotions in order to attract the most qualified participants.

Once a call for artists is published to the site, only Side Arts staff can make listing content changes. This is to ensure that the quality assurance process is not compromised.

Obviously, small changes and misunderstandings may occur as clients start to receive responses. Therefore, listing content changes may be requested for incidental updates; i.e. given the wrong link, change of date/location, or point of contact.

Side Arts’ policy is to have our copywriters format the listings in the best possible way in terms of grammar, online searchability, and current content marketing best practices. We update our Style Guide frequently.

Social promotions are scheduled when the listing is posted. Changing your content may mean proofing and editing social content, as well.

We want your call for artist to succeed! If you have any questions about your promotions, reach out to us at mail@sidearts.com.