What did you hand them when they asked for your CV and you had nothing to put on it?

I'm asking because I nearly died of shame at this. First gallery I approached, they said send your artist CV, and mine was a blank page with one group show from 2019 and my day job on it. I panicked and wrote two paragraphs about "my practice" instead, which I'm fairly sure nobody read.

Now I have a bit more and honestly the blank-CV years are still the thing I dread talking about. So: what did you actually do? Did you send the empty one, pad it out, leave the art out and just talk about yourself, or say nothing and hope they didn't ask?

Tell me I'm not the only one who googled "artist CV no exhibitions" at 2am 🙂

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Lukas Brandt·5d

I sent the empty one. Not out of bravery, more because I couldn't think of a lie fast enough, and the gallerist later told me it was the two paragraphs of prose that would have sunk me, not the missing lines. A thin CV is a fact, a paragraph about "my practice" is a guess about yourself and it usually reads worse than the fact.

What I would say now, having been on the other side of the desk: nobody expects a CV from someone at the start, they expect the work and a short, plain account of what you do and why. Two sentences. Where you studied if you did, what the work is made of, how big, and one honest line about where it's going. That is a CV at your stage. The blank years fill themselves in later and nobody will ever ask you about them again.

The shame is real though, I won't pretend it isn't. I still remember the envelope.

Kasia NowakOP·5d

Two sentences. That's the part I keep turning over, because I wrote about four hundred words and thought I was being thorough. "A guess about yourself" is exactly right and it stings a bit, in a good way.

Can I ask what you actually do with the second thing, the plain account? Do you mean literally put it in the email body instead of a document, or is it a little sheet with the work? I've been attaching a pdf like it's a job application and now I suspect that is the whole problem.

Mira Vey·5d

mine had a decade of logistics jobs on it and one workshop. i sent it. the thing nobody tells you is that a CV with a weird gap and a boring job on it reads as a person, and a CV with three lines of invented exhibition history reads as a problem the moment anyone asks a follow-up question. padding is the only real risk here.

the two paragraphs of prose thing is funny though. i did the same and got about four words back.

Kasia NowakOP·5d

Four words back, oh no. That is somehow worse than silence, at least silence you can pretend was busyness.

The "reads as a person" thing is exactly what I needed to hear, because my instinct was the opposite, that the logistics years were the part making me look unserious. And you are right that padding is the only real risk. I keep imagining the follow-up question. Someone asks which year, and then the whole thing is gone. I would rather be boring than caught.

So did you just list the decade plainly, or did you fold it into one line? I am still deciding how much of my office years to admit to.