When an artist or creative organization publishes an artist statement, its purpose is to deepen understanding of the work by explaining its intentions, motivations, and process. But a strong artist statement should do more than explain what the work is about or how it was created. It should help funders, collectors, audiences, and potential collaborators understand what makes the work distinctive. What does this artist or organization see, do, or reveal that others do not? Many creatives struggle to answer that question clearly.

Complexity Is Not Distinctiveness

Consider a fictional performance organization whose statement says it creates socially engaged, site-responsive performances, participatory installations, videos, objects, and theoretical texts to foster dialogue, dismantle barriers, and bring people of all backgrounds together in unusual ways. On the surface, this artist statement may seem somewhat distinctive because it combines theoretical texts with an interdisciplinary artistic practice, fostering dialogue and bringing people together across the social spectrum. But the truth is that the statement makes the organization sound complex, not distinctive. This organization’s artist statement tells us that they do many different things, but complexity is not synonymous with distinctiveness.

Specificity Reveals Difference

If you look at the activities listed in this organization’s artist statement, such as site-responsive performances and participatory installations, the statement could be describing the work of many organizations. Site-responsive performance is a specific category of art, but naming that category does not explain what makes this organization different from others working in the same form. Combining site-responsive performances with theoretical texts and dialogue may show that the organization’s practice is complex, but complexity alone does not make it distinctive. The problem is that the statement has not answered the questions that would reveal what differentiates the organization’s work. Here are just a few questions they might consider:

· Why site-responsive performances?

· Why these specific sites?

· Why do this now, at this moment in history?

· What do you want audiences to gain from participatory installations?

· What social groups are you trying to bring into dialogue? Why?

· What are you trying to disrupt, reveal, or explore?

The questions above can help this organization move beyond listing the different categories of its work and begin identifying what actually sets that work apart. But the right questions will vary depending on the artist or organization and what they already understand about their work. This is why an outside perspective can be useful. Artists and organizations may sense that their work is different without knowing how to explain why. A skilled outsider can recognize what explanations remain vague and ask questions that help make those differences visible. This is the power of narrative architecture.

Generic Statements Create Loss

When an artist statement fails to show what makes the work distinctive, the result could be missed funding opportunities, fewer exhibition attendees, and a loss of narrative control over the work. Even if an individual artist or organization applies for grants, sends press releases to news publications, and posts on social media consistently, they could be simply increasing the chances of being perceived as forgettable or interchangeable with others.

Imagine a grant panelist reading the generic artist statement of our fictional performance organization and then reading the artist statement of a similar organization that clearly explains how it is different within the category. Who is the panelist most likely to remember and consider seriously for funding? This dynamic, if repeated over the years, can quietly diminish an artist’s or organization’s viability. The artist may reach fewer collectors and win fewer grants. The organization may reach fewer community members, have fewer donors, and secure fewer collaborations with stakeholders.

When artists and organizations repeatedly share generic artist statements with the public, the losses accumulate. Over time, a generic statement can limit the opportunities they receive and the reach and lasting impact of their work.

About The Author

Beverly Aarons is a narrative architect, cultural strategist, and writer who helps individuals and organizations identify and articulate the deeper logic of who they are, what makes their work distinctive, and why it matters. Through strategic questioning and structural analysis, she diagnoses gaps between identity, mission, public perception, and impact, then develops narrative frameworks that strengthen clarity, funding potential, and long-term influence. She is the founder of Artists Up Close.

¹The term “narrative architecture” has been used in other fields, including architecture and storytelling. I use it here to describe my proprietary system for identifying, organizing, and making legible an individual’s or organization’s core identity, distinctive qualities, and the value they create.

© Copyright 2026 - Artists Up Close/Beverly Aarons. All rights reserved.

Symbolism in an artist’s work is essential, yet many artists don’t approach it intentionally. Meaning often emerges from the subconscious—a transmission that can be felt long before it can be articulated. As someone who analyzes art and narrative architecture, I am trained to notice how symbolism operates through color, shape, and objects charged with historical, spiritual, and cultural weight. Symbolism speaks whether or not we plan for it.

I experienced this recently at ARTE NOIR, where Tasanee Durrett exhibited her work Tides of Liberation. She incorporated raffia strands directly onto the canvas—a material historically used by enslaved people for rope, baskets, ceremonial garments, and ritual masks. The moment I saw it, I felt history move through the surface of the painting. I did not interview the artist, so I cannot speak to her intention. But intention is only one component of meaning. Viewers participate in constructing narrative, and my own knowledge recognized the gravity of that material before my conscious mind supplied language.

When I later researched raffia’s history, it unlocked deeper layers of significance, drawing forward fragments of everything I have absorbed over years of reading about culture, memory, and survival. This is where narrative becomes powerful: not only in what the artist embeds, but in what becomes activated in the encounter between artwork and witness.

This activation is a form of inheritance. Whether we understand it biologically, culturally, or psychologically, we carry vast archives within us. They shape our instincts, our attractions, our refusals, our sense of recognition. We may call it intuition, but intuition is often knowledge moving faster than explanation.

I am not suggesting that artists must aggressively uncover every symbolic thread when discussing the narrative of their work. But I am suggesting that you give yourself permission to trust the material rising to the surface. Your inclinations are rarely random. They are tethered to histories, traditions, and narrative structures that exceed individual awareness.

Perhaps a work begins in pure feeling. Yet as it moves into the world, you can ask: Why this gesture? Why this texture? Why this form and not another? What lineage might be speaking through me?

The answers may not arrive immediately. They may remain partial. But the inquiry itself deepens the narrative you tell about the work and expands its communicative force.

Power lives in that exchange—between what we can name and what we carry without language, between the archive inside the body and the object placed before us.