How To Create an Exhibition Checklist

An exhibition checklist—also simply known as a checklist or a price list—is the document that accompanies an exhibition, listing every work on display with its full metadata: the title, year, medium, dimensions, and, where applicable, the price or credit line. Most often you can find it at the entrance or front desk of the exhibition space next to the press release. In this article, we will provide a step-by-step guide and template on how to create your checklists efficiently and professionally, following the industry-approved guidelines used by leading artists and galleries today.

Of all the documents in an artist’s administration, the checklist is the one most often improvised. The good news is that a checklist is a genuinely simple document, and that its simplicity is the point. It has no argument to make and no story to tell; the exhibition already does that. It exists to answer factual questions accurately, in a format the art world recognizes at a glance. A checklist also always you to keep your walls clean, and avoid the visual noise of wall labels, which are preferably only used in institutional contexts or during art fairs.

Throughout this article we will refer to our CAI Checklist Template, available in a solo exhibition and a group exhibition version, so you can produce a checklist in minutes rather than reinventing the format each time you exhibit. If you prefer to build your own, read on regardless—we will cover everything a checklist needs to contain, and the conventions that separate a professional one from an improvised one.

A Step-by-Step Guide To Create Your Exhibition Checklist

1. The Header

At the top of the document, name the exhibition. The header carries the exhibition title, the artist’s name or, in a group exhibition, all participating artists’ names, and the exhibition dates. Keep the exhibition title in italics or in a larger font so it reads as the title of the show rather than as the title of a work. In a solo exhibition, the artist’s name appears here once and does not need to be repeated for each work further down—an economy that matters when you are fitting twenty works onto a sheet of paper. Somewhere at the top of the page, indicate what the document actually is. A small line reading Checklist in the upper corner is enough.

2. Practical Details

Below the header, list the location details: the venue or gallery name, the street address, the postal code, city, and country. The reason to structure this block the same way as your press release is that the two documents will frequently be read side by side, lying next to each other on a table at the entrance. When the header and the practical details of both documents match, they read as a set produced by one hand.

3. Thumbnail Images

Include a small image of each work next to its entry. Give every image the same dimensions so the entries align down the page. A square thumbnail of three to four centimetres is more than sufficient—this is a reference image, not a reproduction, and an oversized image will make the document look like a sales brochure rather than a checklist. Use isolated images of the work itself, never installation views, and never the work photographed in an interior.

4. Metadata

Each entry follows the same structure, and consistency across entries matters far more than any individual choice you make within them. Start with the title of the work in italics. If the work is untitled, write untitled rather than inventing something, and number your untitled pieces per year or refer to them by an inventory or catalogue number—Untitled (No. 5)—so that everyone involved has a unique way of referring to the piece. Then the year, without italics. Use ca. for an approximate date and n.d. or s.d. for an undated work. In a group exhibition, where each entry also carries the artist’s name, you can place the year directly after the title, separated by a comma, to save a line.

Write out the medium properly. Do not write mixed media on canvas; write acrylic paint, charcoal, oil pastel, sand, and varnish on linen canvas. Wooden artist frame. It matters for conservation, for a future catalogue raisonné, and for institutional exhibitions, and it is one of the clearest signals to a professional reader that you understand how your own work is documented. If the work is part of an edition, specify it here as well.

For dimensions, give the height, then the width, then the depth. Two-dimensional works have a depth too, and including it—40 x 40 x 5 cm / 16 x 16 x 2 in—tells a reader something about the profile of the stretcher and how the work will sit on the wall. Where a frame changes the footprint of the work, as is almost always the case with works on paper, give the unframed dimensions first and the framed dimensions second. Keep one measuring system throughout the entire document.

5. Price, Price on Request, or Credit Line

This is the line that determines what kind of document you are making, and it is the line artists agonise over most. For a selling exhibition, list the price, specifying your currency. Listing prices is not vulgar and it is not desperate; it is standard practice in the majority of commercial galleries, and it removes the awkward moment in which an interested visitor has to work out whom to ask. If you would rather not publish figures, write Price on request—a legitimate and widely used option, particularly for higher price points—or leave the line out entirely.

For institutional, non-profit, or loan-based exhibitions, replace the price with a credit line: Courtesy of the artist, Courtesy of [Gallery], or Collection of [Name Surname]. This is what museum checklists do, and it is what tells a reader that the exhibition is not a selling one. For individual works that are not available, write N/A or Not for sale. Use one or the other. Never both.

6. Order & Numbering

Order the works as they hang, following the route a visitor takes through the space from the entrance onwards, per series, or chronologically. In most cases, a checklist ordered by the flow of the room can be read while walking; a checklist ordered chronologically, or alphabetically, or by whatever order the files happened to sit in on your desktop, forces the reader to hunt — hence the first being often an interesting option. This single decision does more for the usability of the document than anything else on this list. Only number the entries if the works themselves are labelled with corresponding numbers on the wall — however, ideally, we keep our walls clean.

7. Contact Details

Close the document with your contact information, or that of the representing gallery: name, website, and email address. A telephone number is optional. If prices are listed, this is also where you clarify the terms in a single line—whether the prices include VAT, and whether the works are available unless indicated otherwise.

8. Design, Format, Printing & Use

Use a clean, neutral design: a white page, a small black or dark grey font, no rules, no borders. The temptation to design the checklist is strong and should be resisted. In the art world, a plain document reads as confident and an ornamented one reads as amateur. Therefore, a checklist is traditionally a single sheet of paper. If your exhibition does not fit on one side, print it recto verso rather than handing visitors two loose pages. If you find yourself needing a third page, you are no longer making a checklist—consider a catalogue with available works instead—unless you are making for curatorial purposes and not external communication. Always export to PDF before sending or printing, and check that every title, year, and price corresponds exactly to your inventory, your invoices, and your website. A checklist that contradicts your own records is probably worse than no checklist at all.

Print a generous stack and keep it within reach at the entrance or at the desk, alongside the in-space version of your press release. Visitors take them, and running out on the second weekend of a six-week show is a small, avoidable embarrassment. Then use the same document as a PDF. It is what you send to a collector who asks what is available, to an advisor enquiring on behalf of a client, and to a curator or gallerist who could not attend the opening. You can send it in advance of the opening as a preview—one of the most effective and least used tools an artist has—and again during the run of the show. Keep it updated as works sell, either by removing sold works or by marking them, depending on how you prefer to work.

CAI Checklist Template

Please find our CAI Checklist Template here, available in a solo exhibition and a group exhibition version, and feel free to discover more career tools for artists to professionalize your art practice and business in minutes, sharing industry-approved templates, tools, and spreadsheets that are being used in the high-end art world today. The Checklist Template is priced at an utmost modest price as it is our goal to provide affordable support and tools, including industry-approved information free of charge, to empower artists to pursue success in the highest realms of the art world.

Last Updated on September 1, 2026