si/Artist statement 

1/ Identify the inquiry that guided your sustained investigation. (600 characters, including spaces)

This is your thesis statement or BIG IDEA. It needs to be clear and specific to your unique series of artwork, helping viewers understand your series as a whole and helping to differentiate your work from others’. What are you exploring and showing us in this series? What is the WHY? of your series? Where did your ideas come from? How does your BIG IDEA connect with your lived experience, interests, and/or research?

2/ Describe ways your sustained investigation developed through practice, experimentation, and revision. (600 characters, including spaces)

From AP: "Students should formulate their questions or inquiry based on their own experiences and ideas. These should be further developed by students throughout the sustained investigation.

If you incorporated artwork, photographs, images or other content created by someone else ("pre-existing work"), you must identify all pre-existing work(s) in the Written Evidence portion of your Portfolio. You should also submit images of pre-existing work so that we can evaluate your transformation of any pre-existing work(s)."

From Ms. Knudsen: How have you explored, evolved, and developed your ideas and series over time? How has your thinking about your topic deepened or shifted? It may be helpful to use time-related phrases like “when I first started,” “as my work progressed,” etc. 

What are some Secondary Concerns of your series? What is unique about the look and style of these artworks, and how they go together? How do these choices support your big idea? 

Conclude your statement with a closing sentence about what you took from making this series and/or what you hope viewers will get from it.

Note: It can be tempting to talk about how it was hard to come up with an inquiry topic, or about themes you abandoned, or processes that you stopped using. Do NOT include this part of the story. Instead, only include what relates to what we can see in your artwork. Your statement should ONLY be about your present, real sustained investigation that we can see, NOT about past ideas that we do not see in your series, or about future works yet to be made.

As you finish your first draft, check that you have included:

• your inquiry question -- BIG IDEA -- and how it evolved over time

• the WHY? of your inquiry: sources of inspiration, connections to your lived experience, interests, and/or research

• research and how it deepened/reframed the inquiry over time

• secondary concerns: processes -- your material and surface choices & manipulation of them; use of specific qualities of elements & principles of art & design; how these choices helped express your Big Idea, and how they shifted over time

• specific examples of the most important of the above

• a concluding sentence about what you got out of this series/what you hope viewers will get out of it

How to cite specific artworks in your statement:

For the AP Art Show, use your titles, either directly in your sentences: “In Bird Bones, I explored the process/idea of...” OR indirectly in a citation at the end of a sentence: “I explored the process/idea of... (Bird Bones).” Note the formatting: Titles in italics.

For the College Board AP Portfolio Exam, use slide (image) numbers: “In slides 3 and 5, I explored the process/idea of...” OR “I explored the process/idea of... (slides 3 and 5).”

Citations are very important! AP is very strict about plagiarism. Refer to the guiding document about plagiarism from AP by clicking HERE.