Getting verified
What the verified seal means on Artsume, how you earn it through a confirmed CV line, the four ways an organization earns it, and why it is never sold.
The verified seal on Artsume is earned, never purchased. It exists so a curator reviewing applications, or an artist deciding where to apply, can trust what they're seeing.
For your profile
Your seal means at least one organization has confirmed a line on your CV. When a gallery confirms your exhibition or a residency confirms your stay, that confirmation is recorded against the exact line, and the blue seal appears next to your name.
The seal belongs to you, not to a side of your account. If you are a curator or an educator with no portfolio, a confirmed line earns you the same seal. See Artists and arts professionals.
How to earn it:
- Add a CV line and link the organization to it. The organization has to be on Artsume, and you pick it from the search in the line's venue or institution field. See Creating your CV.
- Save the line. Artsume asks the organization to confirm it, and a small clock at the end of the line shows the request is open. Open the line to find Withdraw request if you change your mind, or Ask again after a decline. While your profile is unverified, a Get verified chip sits next to your name and opens the same explanation.
- When they confirm, the line carries a check mark on your public CV, and your profile shows the seal.
Asking is free for everyone, and an organization can also confirm a line without being asked.
Verified
Verified and Featured wear the same blue mark. Featured means Artsume has picked the profile editorially, which is a separate thing and unrelated to verification. Point at a seal to read which one it is.
The seal can switch off again. If you edit a confirmed line, the confirmation no longer matches what the line says, so the seal rests until the organization confirms it again. Artsume warns you before you edit. If an organization disputes a line, the seal stays off while the dispute stands, and saving your edit to that line clears the dispute.
The seal cannot be bought. Artsume Pro never grants it. Pro adds insights and reach.
For organizations
Your organization is verified automatically when an owner or admin on your
team holds a confirmed email address at your organization's own website
domain. If your website is example-arts.org and an admin's confirmed
address is director@example-arts.org, the seal appears on its own, with
nothing to submit. Artsume rechecks this whenever the website, the team, or
an address changes, so the seal follows the facts rather than a one-time
sign-in.
Your website may sit on a subdomain of the email domain: a site at
gallery.example-arts.org matches director@example-arts.org. The reverse
does not. An address at director@mail.example-arts.org does not verify a
site at example-arts.org.
Free email providers never match, whatever your website says. Gmail, Yahoo,
Outlook, iCloud, Proton, and the rest are all excluded, because anyone can
open one. Addresses that start with a generic first label, mail among
them, are excluded for the same reason.
The other ways an organization earns it
Not every team has addresses on its own domain, so the domain match is one route of several. Each one proves the same thing a different way: that the people running the page really run the organization.
You claimed the page with its published address. An unclaimed page often carries a contact address the organization published itself, long before anyone signed in. Claiming the page sends a six-digit code to that address, and entering the code proves you read mail the organization already listed. The seal comes with the claim. This route is closed once a page has an owner, because an owner can edit that address to their own.
Artsume put you in the owner's seat. When the Artsume team seats an owner on your page directly, a person has already checked who you are. The page carries the seal from that point.
Approving a page for listing is a different decision and carries no seal. It says the organization is real enough to appear on Artsume. It says nothing about who runs the page, so it earns nothing.
You asked, and we checked. Select Get verified next to your organization's name, or the same Get verified on your dashboard checklist. Tell us nothing extra — we read your page and your website and decide. Use this when your team signs in with personal addresses and your page has no published contact address to claim with.
Holding the owner's seat is not one of the routes. Anyone can create a page for an organization they have nothing to do with, so an owner on its own proves nothing and earns nothing.
The seal can switch off for an organization too. It rests on facts, so it follows them: if the domain match lapses and no other route holds, the seal goes. A seal the Artsume team granted by hand stays until we take it back.
The seal tells artists your organization is who it says it is. It's free for every organization and isn't connected to any plan. See Setting up your organization for the rest of your organization's public page.