⛔︎ end application fees

My first gig after finishing an MFA was a retail job without guaranteed meal breaks. One day at lunchtime, I plopped down on the concrete steps by the back door, shoved a sandwich in my mouth, and opened my phone. The only notification was an open call forwarded from a friend. I tapped through to the application, expecting to bookmark a slideroom portal for later. Instead, the app was a simple google form. No images had to be formatted to specific dimensions; there was just a field for a portfolio site URL. Best of all, there was no fee. As a retail worker managing to create and exhibit artwork while living paycheck to paycheck, it was the first application in months that seemed... feasible. I could fill this out in five minutes on my lunch break, I thought. My next thought was, why aren't all applications like this?

✂︎ The Hidden Costs of Competition

Application fees extract one of artists' most precious resources from a population that is already financially under-resourced. Most artists I know keep afloat with precarious teaching gigs, seasonal jobs, service jobs, or sex work. It's common to live modestly off part-time work supplemented with creative income (Pickens, p. 34).

Furthermore, many arts orgs charge fees to compete, yet don't pay the artists they select. By refusing to pay artists for exhibitions, talks, workshops, and performances, the wealthiest players in the arts sector systemically limit artists' access to cash.

Consider this: Let's say 40 artists spend 20 hours each applying for a $50,000 grant. Among the top finalists, the quality is extremely high, with no meaningful distinctions between the strongest applications. If we value applicant labor at $60/hour, $48,000 of in-kind labor was extracted to award $50,000. How can we say this process gives more to the arts economy than it extracts?

⌦ Do Fees Actually Attract "Higher-Quality" Applicants?

It depends on what your organization means by "higher-quality applicants." Fees attract a homogenous pool of artists who are more likely to be White, middle class/wealthy, cis, straight, able-bodied, and formally educated. If creativity is a human universal, why are four out of five working artists in the US White (Deresiewicz, p. 67)? When it comes to taking economic risks to pursue an art career, the playing field is not level.

In 2022, multidisciplinary artist Suzy Kopf applied to 100 art opportunities and "spent $600 on application fees, the most I've ever spent by quite a bit." However, she noticed "I was rejected from most opportunities that charged $25 or more and that most of my acceptances came from opportunities that were $0-$15 to apply."

In other words, the most legitimate opportunities for visual artists aren't always tied to the priciest contests. Yet in the visual arts, applications with cash fees remain a largely unquestioned fact of professional practice.

⚠︎ The Myth of "Intentional" Submissions

Oftentimes, the logic used to justify small submission fees is that they encourage more "intentional" submissions. But do nominal fees really encourage 'best-fit' applications? This claim rests on the assumption that artists are less invested in fit than gatekeepers, which may not be accurate.

Consider Kopf's data: over five years of tracking applications, her acceptance rate increased because she "became more capable of picking the right opportunities for my career goals." When she tripled her application volume from one year to the next, focusing on good-fit opportunities, her acceptance rate rose from 42% to 56%.

But consider the resources required to participate at this level. In 2022, Kopf spent $600 on just 60 applications, plus countless hours of unpaid administrative work—what might have become a part-time job in itself. In other words, Kopf donated numerous hours of unpaid labor to arts orgs so their staff could be paid to host competitions.

What those who justify fees overlook is that there are always more barriers to submitting than just the fees. An artist might find creative workarounds to make work on a shoestring budget, but when application season rolls around, there's no good way around ten $25 fees.

☠︎ Are Fees an Acceptable Way to Offset Operating Costs?

The common justification boils down to the idea that small arts organizations are struggling under capitalism just as much as artists, and fees help them keep the lights on. I believe small publications when they say they need funding, but how are artists supposed to distinguish between "legitimate" fees and scams when even the largest organizations claim they're "struggling nonprofits"?

Last year, a colleague forwarded me an open call for a writing program at the Banff Centre with a $65 application fee. When I wrote to ask for a waiver, they claimed their "funding is limited." The same year, the Banff Centre received $14.5 million in donations and paid its director over $350,000.

What gets lost in this calculus is that there are also real costs associated with making art. Every artist has overhead, and unlike a museum, we can't send weekly emails asking for tax-free donations to offset our studio rent, materials, web hosting, and administrative duties. Given that institutions have access to kinds and quantities of funding simply unavailable to individual artists, extracting cash from artists through application fees is rarely ethical. 

☞ Practical Alternatives

Instead of using expensive platforms like Slideroom or Submittable, try Google forms that can be completed from a phone. Any brief search about the digital divide confirms that access to laptops and broadband remains stratified by race, income, and disability status. Yet smartphones show no racial or ethnic differences in access, according to 2021 Pew research. 

• Let artists preview the full application by linking to a Google Doc with all questions
• Ensure artists receive email copies of their responses
• If you're getting too many applications, cap submissions rather than raising fees

If you must use a dedicated submissions manager, Oleada is a free tool. 

Step Your Applications! Start with a simple form verifying eligibility and collecting basic info, then invite selected artists to submit full applications. This approach can help curate more diverse applicant pools while saving time for both reviewers and applicants.

☕︎ Asking for Fee Waivers

Artists should make a habit of asking for competition fees to be waived. Here's how:

Dear [Organization],

I was excited to see your call for [opportunity] and believe my work is a good fit. Unfortunately, as a working artist, I am unable to afford the application fee. Would you be able to offer a waiver?

Thank you for considering.

Most of the time, I'm upfront about financial reasons motivating my request for waivers. Artists shouldn't have to justify objections to fees, but transparency often helps.

✍︎ Beyond Competition

The "$25 open call" exemplifies how capitalism infects the art world: it extracts cash from artists to make them compete with each other. Even if all application fees disappeared tomorrow, we'd still face the same fundamental problems—selection processes that aren't fair and reflect larger power imbalances.

What we need to remember is that a vibrant arts sector isn't a food chain, it's an ecosystem. Artists are the soil in this ecosystem: we're intrinsic to the existence of entities like galleries. This should embolden us to advocate for an artist-centered field.

The reason we should push for a more artist-centered field isn't that artists are perfect. It's that artists as a group are under-resourced — most of us are extraordinarily skilled and hardworking, and often the biggest factor limiting our success is access to funding. The vitality of any art scene depends on large numbers of local artists showing up and participating. Artists should reap rewards for being part of things, not just out-competing peers.

Art is not benefited by a scarcity mindset: more art experiences create general familiarity with contemporary art, leading to increased demand and financial support from audiences. There are endless out-of-the-box ways to think about fairer distribution of resources in the arts sector. An art world that is more accessible, more sustainable, and more interesting than competitions is possible.

If you work somewhere that still charges application fees, fill out this form and we will buy and send you a copy of the full end application fees zine. Put it in the lobby, bring it to the staff meeting, slip it into your boss's mailbox — help us spread the word and be part of the movement for change.

India Johnson is a research-based artist working across craft, publishing, and social practice. Her work has been installed in churches, libraries, and laundromats throughout the Midwest, and exhibited nationally and internationally. She is half of Late Night Copies Press and co-founded the Workshop for Independent Publishing. 

Sarah Evenson (they/them/theirs) is a gay, transgender artist living and working in Minneapolis. Their zines and artist books are included in more than 50 archives across the world, ranging from high school libraries to the collection of the MoMA. Sarah is also a 2025 McKnight Fellow at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts and a regular contributor to Better Homes & Dykes. They will trade zines with anyone in the world who asks – just email them!  Sarah's Website | Sarah's Instagram