Part of an artist’s professional practice is regularly exhibiting artwork in solo and group shows. Solo shows involve their own processes, so this post will focus on group exhibitions.
Artists join galleries, cooperatives, or clubs that offer exhibitions, build networks that invite them to various opportunities, and browse aggregated lists of open calls. There’s always been a spectrum to the types of calls out there in terms of their advantages and disadvantages to the artists, but the pandemic unfortunately fostered a boom in predatory and scammy listings.
Let’s just start with a description of the general process: most group exhibition calls have application fees that range from $15-75, which you pay just to be considered. If you are fortunate enough to be accepted and the exhibition is not local, artists are typically expected to pay for the artwork transportation costs (either driving and delivering the work in person to regional sites or outbound-and-return shipping to further afield locations). If artwork is damaged in transit (two of my pieces this year have been due to poor packing on the gallery’s end, as they arrived in showable condition, were exhibited, and then returned to me with broken frames), it’s also on the artist to pay for repairs.
Some shows do have cash awards which can help tip the financial equation back into the artist’s favor, but typically only a couple of pieces receive prizes - so a common scenario might be that 300 artists pay $40 to enter 3 pieces for consideration for Exhibition X, 35 artists’ 50 artworks might be accepted and those artists spend an average of $100 on shipping, and then the top two juror’s choice artworks receive prizes of $500 and $250. The $11,250 raised in the application process beyond the show awards pays for the show advertising and listing fees on aggregation websites, juror honorariums, gallery overhead, and reception catering. 465 artists pay $40 and get rejected, 33 artists pay $140 and participate in the show, and 2 artists respectively net profit $360 and $110 and participate in the show.
While I have won a number of cash awards at shows, my overall application and exhibition record is financially net negative. So why do it? Well, it is a cost of being in this business, much like licensing fees, union membership, or uniforms can be in some industries. In the world of academia in particular, your artistic profile is in part judged based on your exhibition record. Exhibitions can come with benefits beyond prizes, too - they may lead to artwork sales, press coverage, juror requests, and additional opportunities.
There are good, meh, and bad calls out there. Good calls tend to have free to low application fees, physical gallery shows as well as digital access, prizes, and a sizeable audience of viewers. Meh calls might cost more than you’d like to apply, don’t come with prizes or reserve the prizes for an in-group (prizes go to members of X collective), or may have too general a call such that they’re pretty intentionally aiming to raise money rather than seeking out specific subsets of artists/artwork for their real show vision, but nevertheless have physical gallery shows and a sizeable audience of viewers. Bad calls are clear cash grabs - they are often online-only shows with application fees or are “free to enter and a small fee for selected artists” but then accept every artist, and don’t actually have an audience of viewers. These predatory organizations also usually host numerous online “shows” simultaneously, because the purpose isn’t highlighting the artwork - it’s to rake in as many fees as possible.
There were always a few predatory organizations, and it can be tricky to tell the difference between meh and bad sometimes, particularly with newly-launched ones. But during the pandemic, a lot of shows were forced to move online and it masked which organizations were illegitimate, which simultaneously encouraged the growth of scammy sites and inculcated worse standards in inexperienced artists.
The aggregation website Call For Entry, or CaFÉ, used to be the industry standard aggregation website, with EntryThingy in second and Submittable in third. I say CaFÉ “used to be” the industry standard because it’s now verging on the unethical by allowing bad, pay-to-play companies to drown out the real calls (presumably they allow it because those companies pay CaFÉ per listing). Though I never kept track, I’d guess that I used to see 1 bad call for every 10 meh or good calls; now on CaFÉ it’s more like 10 bad calls for every 1 meh or good call.
I think there’s now space for a newcomer to create a better listing engine that filters or eliminates those bad calls entirely, or maybe real art organizations just need to use Submittable more. EntryThingy is OK, but it’s always had suboptimal UI - but now that CaFÉ has sold out, maybe EntryThingy is better for the time being?