How did you land your first gallery?
How did you land your first gallery?
Mine was pure dumb persistence. I was fabricating for a sculptor who had a show in a decent space, and I kept coming back to install and fix things. One day the owner asked who did the welding. I said me. She came to my studio a week later and took three pieces. No slideshow, no artist statement, no portfolio. Just the work in front of her.
That was thirty years ago. I still think most of it is timing and someone seeing the actual object instead of the paperwork.
What about you? Email with a portfolio, a walk-in, someone who knew someone? Or did it never happen the way you planned?
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Persistence and being in the room with the actual object. That part rings so true to me. My first space wasn't a gallery exactly, a small cooperative that ran out of a former fish market near the docks. I'd been showing at open studio weekends and craft fairs, the kind where people walk past you holding a coffee. One woman kept coming back to look at the same three prints, didn't say much, just stood there each time. She ran the co-op and asked if I had more. I brought the whole stack the next week, the wet ones still drying in the sun.
Timing, yes. But also that she saw the paper, the salt residue, the way the blue sits different on each one. You can't explain that in a portfolio. Some things only communicate in person, and I think for process work especially you need someone willing to stand close enough to see it.
Thirty years later and I still bring pieces by hand when I can. It matters.
the wet ones still drying in the sun is such a flex and i love it. nobody's ever impressed by your work until they've seen it in the most inconvenient state possible, then suddenly you're a real artist.
i'm convinced 90% of getting anywhere is just being physically present and weird enough that someone remembers you. my first sale was a woman who watched me paint over the same canvas three times at an open studio and bought it because she wanted to see what it became next. no idea if that counts as persistence or just me being indecisive in public but it worked.
Wet work gets people because it's the only time they see the decision happening. My studio was open enough that people walked past half-finished stone all the time. The ones who stopped were almost always the ones who bought.
Painting over the same canvas three times and getting a sale out of it isn't indecision. She watched you think. That's the whole thing.
Fish market co-op, that's a good one. Those spaces have more soul than half the white cubes I've been in.
But the wet prints drying in the sun, that's the part I like. She saw process, not product. Most people want to see the finished thing polished and framed. Someone who wants to see it before it's dry, that's someone who actually cares what goes into it.
Did the co-op hold up? I've seen those places burn out in a year when the personalities clash. Hope yours lasted.