An artist manifesto is a declaration of what you believe about art, what you want your work to do, and the principles you want to follow as an artist. It can belong to an entire movement or be a short personal document you write for your own creative practice.
Historical manifestos have sometimes been confrontational, political, idealistic, contradictory, or deliberately provocative. Your own does not have to sound that way. It can simply give you a clearer answer to questions such as: What matters to me? What am I trying to make? What do I refuse to compromise on?
Below I look at six influential art and design manifestos, then give you an original artist manifesto example you can adapt for your own work.
If what you actually need is a professional document for galleries, applications, or your website, an artist manifesto is not the same as an artist statement or bio. Compare my artist statement examples, artist bio examples, and other artist writing resources.
What Is an Artist Manifesto?
An artist manifesto is a written declaration of artistic beliefs, intentions, principles, or demands.
Historically, manifestos were often associated with groups trying to break from an existing artistic or cultural tradition. They did not simply describe what the artists made. They argued for what art should become.
A personal artist manifesto can be quieter.
It might define:
- what you believe art should do
- what subjects deserve your attention
- how you want to work
- what conventions you accept or reject
- what you want viewers to notice or feel
- what you want to remember when your practice becomes uncertain
I think of it less as a piece of promotional writing and more as a creative compass.
Artist Manifesto Examples at a Glance
| Manifesto | Year | Central idea |
|---|---|---|
| Futurist Manifesto | 1909 | Reject the past and embrace speed, machines and modernity |
| Bauhaus Manifesto | 1919 | Bring art, craft and architecture back together |
| Dada Manifesto | 1918 | Reject fixed systems, certainty and conventional artistic logic |
| Manifesto of Surrealism | 1924 | Explore dreams, automatic thought and the unconscious |
| First Things First | 1964 | Question whether designers should devote most of their skill to consumer advertising |
| Guerrilla Girls’ declarations and poster campaigns | 1985 onward | Use art, statistics, humor and anonymity to challenge discrimination in culture |
| Personal artist manifesto example | Any time | Define the principles that guide your own creative practice |
1. The Futurist Manifesto
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto was published in 1909 and became a founding text of Futurism.
It rejected reverence for the past and celebrated speed, technology, machines, youth, risk, and the modern industrial world.
It was also intentionally extreme. Parts of the manifesto glorified violence, militarism, and misogyny, ideas that should not be stripped from their historical context when discussing the movement today.
What an artist can learn from it: A manifesto becomes powerful when it takes a position. Marinetti did not merely describe Futurist aesthetics. He drew a line between the culture the movement wanted to leave behind and the future it wanted to create.
You do not need to imitate its politics or aggression. The useful structural question is simpler: What does your work move toward, and what does it move away from?
You can see the historical Futurist manifesto in the Library of Congress collection.
2. The Bauhaus Manifesto
Walter Gropius published the Manifesto and Programme of the State Bauhaus when the school was founded in 1919.
Its central vision was the reunification of creative disciplines. Architecture, painting, sculpture, and craft were not supposed to remain isolated from one another. They could contribute to a larger shared creative project.
That makes the Bauhaus manifesto very different in tone from Futurism. It is still ambitious, but its ambition is constructive: dissolve artificial divisions and bring people with different skills together.
What an artist can learn from it: Your manifesto can describe how you want to work, not only what you want to say.
For example, you might reject the division between drawing and photography, studio work and field observation, fine art and illustration, or whatever boundaries feel artificial in your own practice.
The Bauhaus-Archiv preserves the history and founding ideas of the school.
3. Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto
Tristan Tzara’s Dada Manifesto of 1918 is almost an anti-manifesto.
Rather than constructing a neat artistic doctrine, Tzara uses contradiction, absurdity, provocation, and attacks on fixed systems of thought.
That approach fits Dada itself. The movement developed amid the upheaval surrounding World War I and challenged conventional assumptions about art, reason, order, and cultural authority.
What an artist can learn from it: A manifesto does not need to sound like a corporate mission statement.
The form of the writing can reflect the values of the art. If your creative practice values fragmentation, humor, ambiguity, repetition, or contradiction, the manifesto itself can embody those qualities.
For historical context, see the overview of the Dada Manifesto from Smarthistory.
4. André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism
André Breton published the first Manifesto of Surrealism in 1924.
Surrealism looked beyond ordinary rational control toward dreams, unconscious thought, unexpected associations, chance, and forms of automatic creation.
The manifesto did more than announce an art style. It attempted to define an entirely different way of approaching thought and imagination.
What an artist can learn from it: Your manifesto can identify the conditions under which you believe your best work happens.
Maybe you value observation over invention. Maybe you work best through improvisation. Maybe strict research comes first and intuition comes second. Maybe you deliberately leave room for accidents.
Those working principles can be more useful than broad statements such as “I believe in creativity.”
The Museum of Modern Art’s André Breton resource provides useful context for the manifesto and Surrealism.
5. First Things First
British designer Ken Garland wrote First Things First in 1963, and it was published in 1964 with the support of other designers, photographers, and students.
The manifesto challenged the amount of creative energy being devoted to consumer advertising and argued that design skills could also be used for education, public information, culture, and communication with greater social value.
This makes it especially useful for contemporary artists and designers who feel tension between commercial work and personally meaningful work.
What an artist can learn from it: A manifesto can establish priorities.
You may still accept commercial work while deciding that certain projects, subjects, clients, materials, or values deserve more of your attention.
That kind of distinction can make a personal manifesto genuinely useful when opportunities compete for your time.
6. The Guerrilla Girls
The Guerrilla Girls are an anonymous feminist artist collective formed in 1985. Their posters, public actions, statistics, books, and declarations have repeatedly confronted sexism and racism in museums, galleries, film, politics, and popular culture.
Rather than one single historic manifesto comparable to Marinetti or Breton, their larger body of work demonstrates how a consistent set of principles can be repeated through many different public forms.
They combine research and statistics with humor, bold graphics, provocative questions, and anonymity.
What an artist can learn from them: Your stated values mean more when they affect what you actually make.
A manifesto does not have to live only as a page of text. Its principles can influence your subjects, exhibitions, visual language, collaborations, and the projects you accept or reject.
You can explore decades of work in the Guerrilla Girls project archive.
7. A Personal Artist Manifesto Example
Historical manifestos can feel enormous because they often try to redirect entire movements or institutions.
Your personal manifesto does not have to do that.
Here is an original example for a contemporary artist whose work is centered on drawing and nature:
I will look before I invent.
I will make work from curiosity rather than from what I think an algorithm wants.
I will draw animals and plants as living subjects, not decorations.
I will let observation, travel, memory, and imagination overlap.
I will leave evidence of the hand in the finished work.
I will not polish every drawing until the original energy disappears.
I will learn technique without letting technique become the subject.
I will make some work that has no commercial purpose.
I will keep changing when the work asks me to change.
I will spend more time making art than explaining why I make it.
Notice what this example does not include. There is no career history, list of exhibitions, explanation of materials, or attempt to impress a curator.
Those belong in other documents.
The manifesto is a set of creative commitments.
Artist Manifesto vs. Artist Statement
These two documents are easy to confuse, but I would use them differently.
| Artist manifesto | Artist statement | |
|---|---|---|
| Main purpose | Declare beliefs, intentions or principles | Explain your work and practice |
| Typical audience | Yourself, other artists, a movement or the public | Curators, galleries, applications, collectors and viewers |
| Tone | Can be bold, personal, poetic, demanding or provocative | Usually clear and explanatory |
| Structure | Rules, declarations, paragraphs, slogans or principles | Usually connected prose |
| Focus | What you believe | What you make, how and why |
If you are preparing a gallery submission, residency, grant, portfolio, or professional website, you are more likely to need an artist statement. See my examples of artist statements for that format.
Artist Manifesto vs. Artist Bio
A bio answers another question entirely: Who are you?
It usually includes factual background such as your medium, location, education when relevant, exhibitions, publications, clients, awards, or other professional experience.
A manifesto is not a biography.
Compare the format with my artist bio examples or short artist bio examples.
How to Write an Artist Manifesto
I would not begin by trying to sound important.
Begin by figuring out what you actually believe.
1. Write Down What You Care About
Give yourself ten minutes and answer questions such as:
- Why do I keep making art?
- What subjects do I return to?
- What do I want people to notice?
- What kind of work leaves me dissatisfied?
- What do I refuse to make simply because it is fashionable?
- Which parts of the creative process matter most to me?
- What do I believe artists should protect?
Do not edit the answers yet.
2. Find the Statements That Have Tension
“I love art” is true but does not tell you much.
“I would rather make one drawing from direct observation than ten drawings optimized for social media” contains a decision.
Look for places where you choose one principle over another.
3. Turn Those Ideas Into Declarations
Manifestos usually become stronger when the language is direct.
You can begin lines with:
- I believe…
- I will…
- I will not…
- Art should…
- My work must…
- I choose…
- We need…
- There should be…
You do not have to use all of these. Choose whichever voice sounds natural.
4. Remove the Generic Lines
Read each statement and ask whether almost any artist could say the same thing.
For example:
Generic: I believe art should inspire people.
More specific: I want people to leave my wildlife drawings more curious about the animal than they were before seeing it.
The second tells me something about the artist.
5. Let the Form Match Your Personality
Your manifesto can be:
- five rules
- ten short declarations
- a one-page essay
- a letter
- a poem
- a poster
- a page in your sketchbook
- one sentence you keep above your desk
You do not have to copy the loud rhetoric of early twentieth-century manifestos just because the document is called a manifesto.
A Simple Artist Manifesto Template
If you want a structure rather than a finished example, fill in these prompts:
I make art because ____________________.
I believe art should ____________________.
I keep returning to ____________________.
I value ____________________ more than ____________________.
I refuse to ____________________.
I want viewers to ____________________.
I will protect ____________________ in my practice.
I will experiment with ____________________.
I will stop ____________________.
I will remember ____________________.
You can keep those sentence openings or rewrite everything once the ideas become clear.
How Long Should an Artist Manifesto Be?
There is no required length.
A personal manifesto might contain five sentences. A historical movement manifesto may run for pages.
I would stop when the document says what you genuinely need it to say.
If ten strong principles capture your practice, adding another thousand words may only weaken them.
Does an Artist Need a Manifesto?
No.
A manifesto is useful when putting your principles into words helps you make decisions about your work.
You may never publish it.
It can remain inside a sketchbook, studio notebook, or private document and still serve its purpose.
I would not create one because you think professional artists are required to have manifestos. They are not.
Can Your Artist Manifesto Change?
Yes, and I think it probably should if your work changes substantially.
A manifesto captures what feels important at a particular point in a creative life.
Return to it later and ask which statements still feel true, which have become irrelevant, and which new principles have emerged through actually making the work.
You do not need to defend an old creative rule simply because you wrote it down once.
Where Should You Use an Artist Manifesto?
A manifesto can be public or completely private.
You might use it:
- in your studio as a reminder
- inside a sketchbook
- on a personal website
- as part of an exhibition or project
- as the basis for a collective
- as a creative exercise before developing a new body of work
I would not automatically paste it into applications that request an artist statement, profile, or bio. Give people the document they actually asked for.
If you need those professional forms, compare my artist statement examples, artist profile examples, artist bios, and artist proposal examples.
Use the Examples to Find Your Position, Not Your Tone
The most useful thing about reading famous manifestos is not learning how a manifesto is supposed to sound.
Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Bauhaus, First Things First, and the Guerrilla Girls come from very different historical circumstances and argue for very different things.
What they share is commitment. They make choices about what matters.
That is what I would borrow for a personal artist manifesto.
Do not try to sound revolutionary if that is not how you think. Write down the principles you actually want your next drawing, painting, photograph, sculpture, or project to follow.
Then make work and see whether you still believe them.