Dario Balca, Centretown News
Janna Klostermann is researching the process local artists face when applying for grants.A visionary painter with sublime brushstrokes may have a tough time making it as an artist today if she doesn’t also have a way with words.
Research by Carleton University graduate student Janna Klostermann suggests that writing well – in applications for artist grants, exhibitions, residencies and public art commissions – is crucial to success as an artist today.
“Writing is taking over the art world,” Klostermann says.
The linguistics and language studies master’s student interviewed 10 artists, five curators and two art critics across Ontario for her research.
When deciding what artwork to show, some gallery curators told her they look “first and foremost” at artists’ writing about their art, rather than the work itself, Klostermann says.
Curators have to convince galleries and government funding agencies that the artwork they exhibit satisfies certain priorities, such as contributing to art history or advancing contemporary art.
“(Some) curators mentioned that having an artist who can write about her work makes it easier for curators to do theirs,” Klostermann says.
Ottawa artist Marika Jemma says she doesn’t mind writing about her artwork to apply for grants and other opportunities. She says the writing process can help improve the clarity of her work.
“It’s just kind of assumed … that if you’re going to propose a show that you’re able to speak clearly about what it is that you’re doing,” says Jemma, who is a member of the Enriched Bread Artists co-operative studio on Gladstone Avenue.
She sometimes spends as much as half of her working hours writing applications, she says.
Jemma takes on yoga and art teaching jobs to supplement the modest income she makes from her art. And she says she has to be “flexible” about what she creates to be eligible for enough grants to keep her going.
“I would then sometimes come up with a project that isn’t necessarily on my own agenda, but I’m interested in it in order to get funding to kind of get the ball rolling,” she says.
But she says she’s never made a piece of art solely to get grant money.
“I always manage to kind of have it to be integral.”
When she gets a grant, she says it only covers about four months of work, meaning she continually has to apply for funding.
Klostermann says workers in an array of jobs face demands to prove they’ve been productive by filling out forms.
“I was surprised to see how writing or texts or the ways that people are kind of monitored or governed through texts does happen in the art world too,” she says.
Brendan de Montigny, co-director of Centretown art gallery PDA Projects, says cutbacks to government arts funding in recent years has amped up competition for grants, making good writing even more important.
“I’ll be completely frank, grants usually go out to artists that have had some formal education,” de Montigny says. “It’s only a very small amount of people that are able to make a living as an artist and I think that’s a detriment to moving the identity of Canada forward in our century.”