How'd you land your first gallery showing? I'll tell mine
Y'all ask me all the time how I got my quilts into galleries, and the truth is I didn't go looking for them at first. A lady from a folk art center came out to my church's bake sale of all places, saw a quilt I'd made for my granddaughter's wedding on the table, and asked could she show it. I thought she was joking, honey. I nearly laughed in her face.
Took me two years of her asking before I said yes to the first real showing. Felt like I was showing up in my Sunday best to a place I didn't belong.
So what about you? How'd that first gallery happen for you, did you knock on doors, did they find you, or did a friend drag you in? I want to hear the story. The awkward ones especially.
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That's a good story, and I like that she kept asking for two years. There's something honest about a gallery that has to want you as much as you want them.
Mine was the opposite, the old-fashioned way. I was doing figurative work then, still at the academy in the early nineties, and I took a portfolio around to maybe a dozen spaces in Leipzig. Most of them were polite and said they'd keep me on file, which is what they say when they mean no. One smaller gallery, an older man who ran it, looked through everything and just said, "Come back in two years with something that isn't trying to prove itself." I was insulted at the time. He was right, and that's the showing that actually counted.
I think there's a version of your story where her asking for two years did you a favour. Made you the one who finally agreed, rather than the one who begged. There's a different weight to that, even if it still felt like showing up in your Sunday best. That feeling doesn't fully go away, by the way. I still get it before every opening.
That old-fashioned way is real, though, isn't it. Knocking on doors with your work in your arms takes a kind of nerve I don't know I'd of had at your age. And that man telling you to come back in two years, that weren't a no, that was him seeing something and wanting you to see it too. Takes a certain person to hear that for what it is instead of walking away hurt.
He was right about you, I can tell. You kept going.