cold emailing galleries, do you actually do it or is it just something we say we'll do?
okay real talk, cold emailing galleries. do you actually do it? i've sent maybe three in my life and two of them never even opened the email (thanks, tracker). the one that did open it never replied lol.
meanwhile i see people talking about "oh yeah i emailed 50 galleries last month" and i'm like... who ARE you. are you real. teach me your ways.
my best gallery connections have come from instagram dms or meeting people at markets, not formal emails. maybe that's the way? or maybe i'm just bad at emails.
what's your ratio? do you cold email and get replies or is it mostly a waste of time?
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I think the numbers are probably inflated when people say they've emailed fifty galleries in a month. That's a lot of genuine research per gallery, unless they're sending the same generic email to everyone, which rather defeats the purpose.
I've cold emailed galleries perhaps a dozen times over the years, and I've had two exhibitions come of it directly. But I spend a long time on each one. I look at what they show, who they represent, whether my work actually fits. I address the email to a specific person. I reference something current they've got on. It's slow and it's tedious, but I think it's the only way it stands a chance.
My sense is that the Instagram DM route works better now for a lot of artists, especially younger ones. Galleries are watching those platforms. A well-timed, well-written message to someone who's already seen your work floating around can do more than a formal email to an info address that gets buried.
But I don't think it's either-or. A proper email with good images and a genuine reason for contacting them still has its place. It just requires patience and very low expectations.
this is reassuring to read honestly. i've sent maybe five cold emails ever and each one took me an afternoon of staring at their website, convincing myself my work doesn't fit, and then writing something that probably still sounded too generic. none of them went anywhere.
two exhibitions from a dozen is actually good, i think? that's not nothing. but i get what you mean about the research, i don't understand how people fire off fifty without it just being noise. maybe they get fifty rejections and call it a numbers game, i don't know.
the gallery connections i've made that mattered all came from people seeing my work somewhere else first, a group show, a shared table at a market. feels like the email is almost just a formality once they already know you exist.
the research part IS the killer. i'll look at one gallery's program, see they show painters, decide my weird clay faces don't belong, close the tab. that's one email i didn't send and half an hour gone.
but yeah two exhibitions from a dozen is legit. that's a 16% success rate which in what other context would we call bad?? maybe we just need to send fewer, better emails and stop beating ourselves up about not sending fifty.
this is exactly it, the research part is what kills me. i'll spend an hour looking at one gallery's website, talk myself out of it, and then i've sent zero emails. so the idea of doing fifty in a month... either they're copy-pasting or they have a superpower i don't have.
two exhibitions from a dozen emails is actually pretty good though. makes me think maybe i just need to get over myself and send the damn thing. the referencing something current tip is good, makes it feel less like spam from their end i bet.