How did you get your first gallery to even open your email?
Okay so I'm about 8 months into doing this full time and I've sent maybe 15 cold emails to galleries and gotten exactly one reply, which was a no, but a NICE no, and honestly I printed it out?? haha.
Here's my actual question: how did you get your first gallery to even open the email. Not the whole relationship, just the door cracking. Did you walk in with work under your arm? Did you know somebody? Did you go to an opening and corner the owner (respectfully)? Did you just send 60 emails until one landed?
My own answer: the one no I got came from a gallery I'd actually been to in person first, stood in front of a painting for way too long, and then emailed saying I'd seen the show and here's my work and it might sit next to this one artist's stuff. That's the only one that ever answered me. So now I'm convinced showing up in person actually matters and I want to know if that's real or if I just got lucky once.
Tell me yours. Especially if it was dumb or accidental, those are my favorite ones.
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Honey, I did not get mine through email at all, and I want to tell you that plainly so you don't wear yourself out thinking you're doing it wrong.
Mine came because a woman from my church knew a woman who ran a little space downtown, and she carried one of my quilts over there in the trunk of her car without even asking me first. Called me that evening like it was nothing. The gallery owner looked at it, called me, and we talked near two hours about her mother's people and cloth and what gets kept. That was the door. Not the letter, the person.
So my honest answer to your question is that the door usually cracks through somebody who already loves you. Not a big name, just somebody willing to say your name in a room you ain't in. Which means the work of it is more about being around than about perfecting the email. The openings. The church. The little shows. The fabric store, even. Folks remember a face.
Now listen. Fifteen emails and one kind no is not failure, baby. That nice no means somebody read it. I keep mine too. But eight months in, I'd put more of that energy into getting in rooms and less into getting in inboxes.
And you know, the Lord has a way of opening the right one when He's ready. Not always the one we picked. Keep sewing either way. The work is the part that lasts.
The trunk of the car is the bit that gets me. No ask, no preamble, just gone with it.
Mine was somewhere between the two. I'd emailed one crowd twice with no reply, and then the same gallery had a show opening, so I went in with a couple of proofs under the arm, thinking I'd leave one on the table and slope off. Ended up yarning to the woman who ran it for about forty minutes about a hare I'd been carving for the third time because I still hadn't got the back leg right. She never looked at the proofs once, but she rang me a week later. So it was the person, yeah. Only I had to be in the room for the person to be in the room, if that makes sense.
The email isn't wasted, by the way. Just doesn't open the door on its own.
Forty minutes about the hare's back leg and she never looked at the proofs. That's the part I can't get over, in a good way. You spent the whole conversation on the thing you were stuck on and that's what sold her, not the finished ones.
I keep hearing the same shape from everyone: the work that got someone in the door is never the work they were trying to show. Which is annoying because it means I can't engineer it.
Also a hare carved three times because of one back leg is very much my energy, except mine is a window, so. How's the leg now, did you ever get it?
Okay wait, the quilt in the trunk of a car, without asking you first?? I love her. That's the whole thing right there isn't it, somebody who believed in it enough to just carry it across town for you. And the two hour phone call about her mother's people and what gets kept, I got a little choked up reading that honestly. That's what I want from a gallery and I've been out here writing emails like it's a job application haha.
I think I've been doing the "letter" thing because it's the part I can control from my apartment at 11pm. Which is also the part that clearly isn't working. So the actual answer is go be a person in a room with people, which is the thing I'm worst at and also the whole point. Noted. Thank you for saying it plain, I needed the plain version.