Public Art Programs Editing and Proofreading Services

A call for artists offers a hundred thousand for a permanent work in a plaza. Forty artists apply. Six of them understand that the figure has to cover engineering, fabrication, a structural certificate, transport, a crane, insurance during installation and a maintenance manual — and the other thirty-four are competing for a fee that does not exist.

We edit what public art programmes and commissioning bodies produce — calls for artists and requests for qualifications, commission briefs and scope documents, selection processes and panel criteria, artist agreements and payment schedules, community consultation material, maintenance and conservation plans, deaccession policies, and reporting to funders and councils. Our editors work on documents that decide who applies.

The call's budget and scope statement is what determines whether a commission attracts the right artists, and its failure is a headline figure with an undefined boundary. An artist who cannot see what the money must cover cannot decide whether to spend three weeks applying. We work through these so the total is broken into what the commissioning body pays for separately and what must come out of the artist's budget — engineering, permits, fabrication, transport, installation, plant hire, site works, insurance, documentation — since the difference between a hundred thousand inclusive and exclusive is the whole decision; so the artist's own fee is either stated as a figure or a percentage, or the call says plainly that it is for the artist to determine, given that an unstated fee is generally the item that gets compressed; so the site is described with the constraints that will govern design — services beneath, wind loading, adjacent uses, planning conditions, the client's maintenance capacity — because a design developed in ignorance of these is a wasted concept stage; so the concept stage is paid, as unpaid speculative design is what keeps established artists away; so the selection process is set out with the stages, what is required at each and the dates, since artists plan around this; so intellectual property, moral rights and the right to relocate or remove the work are addressed honestly; so the maintenance expectation is stated, as a work requiring annual specialist attention needs a client who has agreed to it; and so the appointing body says who decides. Calls written this way attract artists who can deliver.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including briefs, budgets, panel material and artist submissions. We are editors rather than curators, engineers or commissioners, and we offer no view on selection, budgets or public art policy. What we can do is make the scope visible before an artist commits three weeks.