Skills: Writing Work Descriptions + Project Descriptions

Take your work descriptions to the next level with the help of industry expert, artist and grant writer Christy Gast and Florida International University professor Alpesh Patel. Learn best practices on how to make your description clear and concise, while still standing out from the crowd.

About the Instructors

Alpesh Kantilal Patel is associate professor of contemporary art and theory at Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. His art historical scholarship, criticism and curating reflect his queer, anti-racist, and transnational approach to contemporary art. He is the author of Productive failure: writing queer transnational South Asian art histories (Manchester University Press, 2017) and editor of the exhibition catalogs Modern Times: mounir fatmi (2016), Concrete Feet: Tom Scicluna (2016), Cause Way: Paul Donald (2016) and This Too Shall Pass: New Work by Saravanan Parasuraman (2014). He is co-editor of a special journal issue of Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art commemorating Okwui Enwezor (forthcoming in 2021) and Storytellers of Art’s Histories (Intellect Books, forthcoming in 2021). An organizer of exhibitions in the United States and Europe, he is a regular contributor of art criticism to frieze, Hyperallergic.com, Artforum, artforum.com, and Art in America. Prior to arriving at FIU in 2011, he worked in the curatorial and directorial departments of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, both in New York City. Dr. Patel received his PhD in Art History & Visual Studies from the University of Manchester and a BA in History of Art with distinction from Yale University.

Christy Gast is an artist whose work has been exhibited at the New Museum of Contemporary Art and MoMA/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (New York), the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, Bass Museum of Art, de la Cruz Collection, Locust Projects, and Nina Johnson in Miami; as well as museums and galleries internationally. She collaborates with the collective research program Ensayos on ecologically-focused interdisciplinary projects encompassing art, science and ethics, and is on the faculty of the Nomad MFA program at the University of Hartford’s Hartford Art School. Her writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Pioneer Works Journal, and several anthologies. For 20 years, she has written grants for cultural nonprofits and consulted with individual artists on proposal writing, resulting in millions of dollars in funding on behalf of clients from the National Endowment for the Arts, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and many others.