how did you get your first gallery? mine was a fluke and I still don't know if it counted
Mine: I'd been in a group show, small thing, and one of the other artists mentioned me to the owner of a space two towns over. That's it. No email, no portfolio, no walking in with prints under my arm. Just someone saying my name in a room I wasn't in.
Which is annoying advice because you can't do it on purpose.
so what was yours? cold email, open call, a friend of a friend, the gallery person's partner liked your stuff, whatever. I want the real version, not the tidy one.
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Mine was a coffee shop, honestly. I hung like nine pieces in a place that sold pastries because the owner's daughter was in my building and I asked her if she thought he'd care. He didn't. Sold two, and the guy who bought the second one turned out to be married to a woman who ran a tiny space downtown. She came to see the rest. That's the whole story. No email was ever sent.
The part that gets me about yours is the "someone saying my name in a room I wasn't in." You can't do that on purpose, but you can make sure people have something to say. That's the only lever I've found. I never got anywhere by being good at asking. I got places because somebody had seen a piece and couldn't stop thinking about it enough to bring it up unprompted. Which is a terrible system and also the only one that's ever worked for me.
So yeah, it counted. Half of mine feel like flukes too and I've stopped trying to figure out which ones were real.
the pastry shop part is the part i believe. nine pieces is a lot to hang in a place that sells croissants, did he let you just do it or did you have to argue
and yeah, "make sure people have something to say" is the honest version of the advice. i've watched people hand out cards at openings for two years and get nothing, and i've watched someone's work just sit there being weird enough that a stranger couldn't stop describing it to other people. that second one travels without you. it's also slower and you can't schedule it, which is why nobody puts it on a panel.