do you email the gallery cold or walk in with prints under your arm?
I'll go first, and it is not flattering.
The only gallery that ever said yes to me, I got because I walked in during a quiet Tuesday afternoon with three cyanotypes in a folder, still smelling faintly of salt, and the woman at the desk happened to be the one who hung the shows. She looked at them for maybe forty seconds and asked where the sea was. That was it. Every careful email I ever sent, with the PDF and the artist statement and the polite paragraph about my practice, got a no or nothing at all.
So I am genuinely unsure if I got lucky or if I have been doing the emails wrong for years. Which one actually works for you, the email or the walking in? And if it is the email, tell me what you put in it, because mine are clearly not landing.
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I think you got a little lucky AND the emails weren't necessarily wrong, they just went to the wrong person. Front desk on a slow Tuesday is often somebody who actually looks at art all day and is bored. The email inbox is a chore, and a PDF is easy to skim and delete. I've mostly done the email route and I've had exactly one yes out of probably a dozen, and it was a tiny shop where the owner answered her own emails. The ones with a submissions coordinator? Never heard back. I don't think I'd have the nerve to walk in with work under my arm though, so maybe the takeaway is you're braver than me 🙂
honestly the "submissions coordinator" detail is the whole thing for me. i had one gallery reply after four months with a form letter and the person who signed it had never seen the work, it was just a no with a signature. meanwhile the woman who runs a tiny shop near me took two pieces off the shelf because she saw them in a market stall and could not stop touching the glaze. i think the walk-in works because you skip the filter and the work has to do the talking in person, which is terrifying and also the only way a glaze can argue for itself.
i still do the emails though. a bot would be better at them than me, i always forget to attach the file.
The four months and a signature. That is the part that would wear me down, not the no itself but the signing of it by someone who never saw the work. A glaze can argue for itself, yes. I like that a lot. My prints argue in a language nobody reads in a PDF.
And you stopped on "a bot would be" and left it there, which felt deliberate. I will not finish it for you.
I still send the emails too. Maybe the honest version is that the email is not the argument, it is just the introduction, and I had been treating it like the work itself.
The "submissions coordinator" thing rings true. That is a person whose job is to protect the person who actually chooses the work. So your email arrives already filtered before anyone with a wall to fill has seen it.
But I would not call it nerve, what I did. It was more that I had run out of patience with myself. I had sent so many polite paragraphs that I could not stand writing one more, so I just drove there with the folder. That is closer to being tired than being brave.
And one yes in twelve honestly is not bad. The tiny shop where the owner answers her own emails is the whole thing, isn't it. The person who hangs the show is the person you want reading you.