All artists and craftspeople must promote themselves and their career if they are to secure jobs, exhibitions, sales, publicity and a reputation in the art world. No matter what kind of work you make, or what kind of career you think you have (or don't have), self promotion is necessary or no-one will ever hear about the work you are doing.

Promoting yourself needn't be about high-profile networking or cynically using people for your own ends.  Your friends, colleagues, and even the people you meet at parties and gallery openings are all part of your self promotion network, as you are a part of theirs.

Much self promotion you will be doing already - meeting with friends, handing out opening night cards or business cards, setting up a website, preparing your CV or thinking about media releases are all aspects of self promotion that are easy and cheap to do.  Building your network and maintaining your contacts is one of the most important aspects of self promotion, so that you can effectively tell the people who have expressed an interest in your work when you have new projects or exhibitions to tell them about. 

At the top end of the scale, you might choose to hire a promotions team to help you market and sell your work.

This section begins with an overview of self promotion for artists, written by Sarah Thelwall (copyright © 2004) and commissioned by Artquest.  It is designed to help you identify and set some personal goals with specific audiences for your work, develop all the information you want to communicate to them, as well as the promotional 'pieces' to get your message across. It also covers a variety of situations in which you will use these promotional pieces (exhibitions, commissions, residencies etc). This whole section is more about helping you ask questions of yourself rather than provide a fixed and finite set of answers - it is about finding a way of promoting you and your work that suits you; the only absolute is professionalism in all things.

The last four pages in this section list other online resources around self promotion activities, promotion companies that can help (if you have the budget) as well as valuable information and advice as to how to manage this part of your career on your own.\

In March 2009, Artquest organised a talk by artist Gordon Cheung on his approach to self promotion, as part of our Self Assembly series.  You can listen to the audio from this talk on the Self Assembly page of the website.