Your curatorial statement is a great opportunity to help guide the way the public perceives your exhibition. It’s a chance to communicate directly with viewers, help them understand your point of view, and get them excited and curious about the work they’re about to experience.

When writing the curatorial statement, it’s good to keep some general guidelines in mind.

• The statement should be about 150-200 words and 2-3 paragraphs.
• It can be helpful to follow a basic structure—for example, using the first paragraph to establish the overall premise of the exhibit, the second to illustrate the range of artists’ approaches with examples, and the third to suggest the wider significance of your theme.
• If there’s a particular work that was especially instrumental in the way you thought about the exhibition, it might be interesting to describe that work in depth to draw the viewer into your thought process.
• In general, you want an informative and persuasive tone, somewhere in between an academic paper and a newspaper article. That means no use of the word “I” or first-person observations.

Example:

The Refugee exhibition was shaped around reflecting and exploring different aspects of a refugee’s struggle. Refugee's are a worldly issue and cause major conflict within the country that the refugee's are fleeing to. Consequently there needs to be more recognition on this controversial political subject. Therefore the exhibition’s purpose is to take-on an interpretation of a refugee’s struggle; whether that is by causing one to question a refugee’s status, understand and gain more of an awareness towards the Refugee’s endeavors or simply grasping the emotions of a displaced person.

The Refugee exhibition displays artworks created from different media that reflect distinctive attributes of a refugee’s journey. The exhibit has especially incorporated a range of different mediums as an underlying metaphor that not one refugee’s story will be the same as another – therefore no artwork in the gallery is alike.

The six artworks are positioned in consecutive order of the general view of a refugee’s journey. The opening artwork is of refugees fleeing their war-torn country, and then follows a photograph of refugees fleeing in masses. The next drawing reflects the voyage as a chaotic and messy trek, followed by a painting of their journey by boat and subsequently an artwork displaying a refugee’s displacement in the world. The next photograph shows a woman and her child tired from their journey, and lastly we end the exhibition with an artwork portraying how even up to present times, some refugees do not feel at home and comfortable in the country they have settled in.