Blog / 2025 / Why Juried Art Show Fees Are Wrong

When musicians perform live, most people would agree that they deserve to be paid.* They’re making art right there in front of you and, while their work may be enjoyable, it’s still a job, and labor deserves to be rewarded.

And yet, when visual artists display their art for people to enjoy in person, the audience doesn’t usually think twice about whether or not they’re being paid.

For one thing, unlike musicians, artists aren’t necessarily there in the flesh—their very existence acting as a plea that their humanity be recognized. For another, even if a visual artist is present at an exhibition, they aren’t creating the piece in front of you like musicians do. So, despite the fact that an art show is the visual artist equivalent of “live” art, painters, sculptors, and the like almost never get paid to exhibit.

In fact, the opposite is true. Often, when you’re experiencing visual art in person, the creators of this art have had to pay money in order to display their work. Scratch that: they’ve had to fork over a fee in order to have their art reviewed and then maybe, if they’re lucky, exhibited.

Because juried art shows are what I call “pay-to-(maybe)-play,” with application fees coming in at anywhere from $10 to $90.

The price that artists pay to submit work to juried exhibits can help a venue give an honorarium to the judges, who are sometimes well-known gatekeepers—individuals with the sort of power and connections that might ostensibly be useful to an applicant’s career. Or the fees might go towards the artist awards that these shows sometimes offer. Mostly though, the application money is an excellent source of revenue for the galleries or institutions that organize the exhibits.

All in all, this is a crappy system for visual artists. It’s the antithesis of having your labor valued, and I only participated in this system once every few years in the first two decades of my career, until I moved to a new town a while back.

For the first time in my life I was trying to introduce my work to local art lovers without the benefit of social media, because I’d deleted my profiles in 2020. In the region where I live now, there are a ton of juried shows and it seemed like those pay-to-(maybe)-play exhibits might be a good way to get my work seen. I decided to test it out.

Over the last 24 months, I applied to nine juried shows, with fees ranging from a very reasonable $15 through the too-high industry standard of $40 to a completely outrageous $60. Out of these nine applications, my work was accepted five times and twice it was selected for awards, which totaled $600. In other words, between the fees and my awards, my net gain was $283, which just barely covers my travel time and the mileage for schlepping my art along with the administrative work I did applying for all these opportunities.

All of which is to say that, while I’m certainly pleased that I haven’t lost money in this experiment, the numbers still don’t add up for me. That’s especially true considering that I’ve found that jurors—even the ones who recognize my art with awards—aren’t particulary interested in connecting with my work in a deeper way.

Juried shows may make sense for artists who have a source of income besides selling their art. I’m talking about creatives who’ve retired from another career and have a pension, those who are independently wealthy or who have a spouse to support them financially, and, possibly, those with a day job.

But I’ve been a full-time artist since I earned my BA in 2003. For most of my career, I’ve focused on applying for stuff that doesn’t come with a submission fee, while also speaking out loudly against the pay-to-play model. In fact, more often than not, I create my own opportunites, as I discuss at some length in this post about getting your work in front of new audiences without social media.

Over the last two years, I’ve thoroughly explored the world of juried shows, applying to community spaces and commercial ones along with academic venues, and it’s left me feeling more certain than ever that these competitions aren’t for me. I may not have the energy to try to convince venues to give me money every time my art is “live,” but I refuse to pay those same institutions to get my work out there.