All Pages You Need For A Professional Artist’s Website

1. Selected works

Alternative page names: Selected Work / Works / Work / Portfolio

The selected works page consists of a representative selection of the artist’s (recent) oeuvre, presenting the best artworks or exhibition views of the artworks, including the metadata such as the title, year, medium, surface, and dimensions of the artwork. When using installation views to showcase the artworks, make sure to specify the venue where the artwork was on display and possible photo credits of the photographer. Don’t show too many works. Kill your darlings. Show only your very best and most relevant/recent pieces. A selection of 10 to 25 images is advised as a sweet spot.

You can present the works in a slideshow, a grid that opens up the image in full in a Lightbox when clicking the thumbnails, or design a simple page in which you can scroll down to see the rest of the selected works. Organize your works in a single image gallery, ordered chronologically, showing the most recent artworks first. Feel free to organize your work in categories, such as the year in which it was created, the artistic discipline, or different series.

E.g., The websites of Xie Lei, Edith Dekyndt and Andreas Senoner.

2. About

Alternative page names: Info / CV / Resume / Bio

The About page has the function of providing the web visitor with a clear and concise overview of the artist’s career so far. In the art world, one of the most important documents for artists is the CV or artist’s resume. In fact, many art world insiders first have a look at the resume of the artist before navigating to the portfolio to have a look at who they’re dealing with. The most important thing—especially when you are not as established yet—is to follow the archetypical structure of artist resumes closely, providing a list mentioning your name, where and when you were born, where you are based, your education, previous exhibitions, awards, residencies, collections, and more. For more information on how to set up your resume correctly, feel free to navigate to our tutorial on How To Write an Artist’s Resume or to purchase our CV Template. If you have a lack of experience and thus no information to write down on your resume, make sure to have a look at our article explaining how anyone can improve their resume with little to no experience.

To conclude, you could add a short bio text describing your practice and career in the third person. Avoid sharing an artist statement—which is predominantly used by hobby artists and not by ‘art world artists.’ For more information on how to write a professional artist bio, feel free to read our complete article or consider purchasing our Bio Generator Tool.

The about page is preferably a text-only page, however, you could include a professional portrait picture of the artist as well.

E.g., The websites of Laurent Proux, Stan Van Steendam and Michael Simpson.

3. Contact

Alternative page name: Info

Now that we have established to provide a publicly accessible portfolio and professional resume, the last must-have page your website needs is a contact page so people are able to get in touch with you when they are interested. As a beginner or emerging artist, the most efficient and personal way to do this is by sharing an email address on this page or a button opens a new window in which the web visitor is writing a new email to you directly. Make sure you have a professional email address, such as [email protected], or a personalized email address using your domain name, such as [email protected]

You could opt to use a contact form, especially when you become more famous or established and want to avoid being flooded by irrelevant inquiries, but if that isn’t the case, just share an email address to come across as more personal and less corporate. Remember, artist’s websites are websites about people, not (corporate) businesses.

Keep your contact page as clean as possible. In addition to an email address or contact form, you could also include the contact information of your galleries, a button to sign up for your newsletter or mailing list, a phone number or studio address, and links to your social media.

E.g., The websites of Johnny Abrahams, Luc Tuymans and Ottobong Nkanga.

4. Press

Alternative page names: Texts / Writings

The first page we would add to the trio of must-have pages is a page with a selection of texts, writings, essays, interviews, and articles about your work to provide more context about your work. The most important thing is that the text is written by other people and not by yourself, as it is frowned upon in the art world to overly self-promote or to talk about yourself.

A first requirement, of course, is to have these texts about yourself, which occurs when participating in shows and the curator, gallery director, or freelance art critic writes an artist bio or press release discussing your work or when you have been invited for an interview or other online feature—which can also be achieved via submissions—or by requesting an art critic to write about you.

The format consists of a list with bibliographic references to those texts, to which hyperlinks are connected to click through to an online page or pdf file where we can find the text in question.

E.g., The websites of Marlene Dumas, Alicja Kwade and Kader Attia.

5. Publications

Alternative page names: Books / Bibliography / Media / Editions

Next, we can create a page for physical publications in the form of books, artist editions, a catalog raisonné, exhibition catalogs, and more. As this type of page is less common in the art world, there is no fixed archetype or set of unwritten rules when it comes to the design or structure of this page. Predominantly, we either see a list of images of the publications followed by their metadata, a bibliographic list using text-only, or larger depictions of the publication, including additional information in the form of a store or portfolio format.

E.g., The websites of Niklas Asker, Justin Mortimer and Pieter Vermeersch.

6. Exhibitions

Alternative page names: Projects / Events / News

Another optional page consists of an overview page with upcoming, ongoing, or past exhibitions, projects, and events. By doing so, visitors can keep track when and where your work is on display. A chronologic overview starting with the most recent show is the ideal format. You can either show just an image and the most important information (date, place, venue), or you could opt for a blog-post format in which the visitor can click through to find more images in the form of installation views and more information such as the full press release of the exhibition.

E.g., The websites of Andy Denzler, Theaster Gates and Ugo Rondinone.

7. Store

Alternative page names: Shop / Available works / Collect

To conclude, we discuss a page dedicated to having an online store or a selection of available works. It makes sense that artists want to have a store on their website, especially when they haven’t had the chance to work with galleries to find any traction in the art world or in terms of sales. However, webshops can be frowned upon by the art world—a topic we extensively discuss in our article on How To Sell Art With Your Website—hence finding no examples at all of successful mid-career or established artists having a store on their website, despite the great demand for their work.

Having a store or webshop is a strategy that can be useful and sometimes very successful for artists using the influencer model and trying to offer low-value products to their audience, or creatives who aim to build an e-commerce art business and use ads to drive traffic to their site, and also artists who represent themselves and have no interest in climbing the ladder of success in the art world.

If you do want to have a webshop and aim to keep your options open for the art world, make sure to have a separate portfolio page and store page. A store page could also be useful for artists who want to sell prints or books, keeping the store entirely separated from their portfolio and original artworks. For more information on this topic, make sure to read the aforementioned article on how to sell art via your website, where we explain how you can sell directly and online while maintaining a high-end profile for the art world by using a catalog with available works on request.

E.g., The websites of Nikolas Antoniou, Johan Barrios and Ruben Benjamin.