Rejection Letters

A Gesture of Solidarity with all Artists

Written by Various Funders and Residency Hosts

Rejection is a major part of being an artist. The distortion of self-curated media would imply that success, beauty, and fame are the norm. While it is becoming increasingly popular to share the darker side of our lives to combat this distortion, that discourse appears to be limited to mental health and the occasional collapse of a bowl in a pottery class. Here instead, I offer a collection of emails and letters I have received from programs to which I have applied.

The experience is this: One has an idea. One gets excited. One works very hard putting the idea into words that communicate the full scope and shape of the idea. One sends this work to someone with money/space/time/all three. One is told there were many strong applicants but one’s application was not selected. One asks for feedback so that one can better articulate the idea to someone else, or to the same people next year. One is told there are just too many applications to do that. One learns nothing. One tries again.

Occasionally, one is given feedback. Often this amounts to, “there was nothing wrong with the application, we just had other considerations which the applicants could never account for.” Very, very rarely (in my experience, two funders), the feedback is constructive.

As it slowly becomes clear that it is a game of numbers, of odds, of chance, one begins to recycle language from previous applications. Often the deadlines are clumped within days of each other, and it is just easier to recycle an old application than write a new one. And anyway, one can never know if the application was truly strong, or if they were just being polite. Both funder and applicant are left feeling empty, reading stale ideas rendered in stale language.

I do not consider myself a successful artist. But in the unlikely event someone out there does, this collection is for them.