Artist CV Guide: How to Structure a Professional Artist CV

What an artist CV actually is

An artist CV is a structured record of your exhibitions, education, awards, publications, residencies, and collections. It is how galleries, curators, grant panels, and residency juries evaluate where you are in your career and what you've been doing.

Unlike a corporate résumé, it is not trying to get you hired. It is trying to give a reader a quick, accurate picture of your practice. That changes everything about how it is written.

The standard section order

Artist CVs vary, but the conventional order for a mid-career artist runs like this:

1. Name and contact
2. Education
3. Solo exhibitions (most recent first)
4. Selected group exhibitions (most recent first)
5. Residencies
6. Awards and grants
7. Publications and press
8. Public, private, or corporate collections
9. Teaching and lectures (if relevant)

Emerging artists often invert education and group exhibitions, or combine "solo" and "two-person" shows when there aren't many solos yet. That is standard and not a problem.

How to format an exhibition line

The convention is:

Year. Exhibition Title, Venue, City

So a line might read:

2026. Slow Archive, Cell Projects, London

Keep the formatting consistent down the whole document. Italicize titles of exhibitions, publications, and works. Don't mix formats. Nothing telegraphs "first draft" faster than three different formatting styles in a single section.

Selected vs full

Once your exhibition history grows past a page or two, start using the word "Selected." A "Selected Group Exhibitions" heading tells the reader you've curated the list, which is more professional than a 40-line recitation of everything you've been in since 2012.

What gets "selected" in? Shows that are recent, have strong venues, were well reviewed, or are thematically important to your work. Everything else comes out.

Emerging artist: how to fill a sparse CV

If you're early in your career, don't pad. A short, honest CV with three real group shows reads better than a long one with coffee-shop exhibitions inflated with exhibition-sounding titles. Jurors can tell.

Things that do count and are often forgotten:

• Degree show or graduate exhibition
• Juried shows at regional galleries or artist-run spaces
• Online exhibitions if the venue is credible
• Published artwork features in a real publication
• Residencies and open studios
• Teaching workshops or artist talks

Where artists lose credibility

Common mistakes that make a CV read as unprofessional:

• Mixed date formats (2026, '25, 2024)
• Listing private collections by name without permission from the collector
• Calling something a "solo exhibition" when it was a single wall in a group show
• Listing your own website in "publications"
• Using a photo header — the CV is text. Photos belong in your portfolio or PDF art catalog.
• More than two pages if you don't have the history to fill them

Keep it current, automatically

The hardest thing about an artist CV is not writing the first version — it's keeping it up to date across a year of shows, publications, and talks. The cleanest approach is to log every exhibition against the actual artwork at the time it happens, and pull the CV from that record when you need it.

If you keep your exhibition history scattered across emails and notes, you will rebuild your CV from memory every time someone asks for it — and forget half of it. A structured inventory tool that stores exhibition history against each work turns that rebuild from a chore into an export.