How did you land your first gallery? I walked in with wet prints
Mine was almost an accident. I had a stack of cyanotypes still smelling of salt, and I walked into a small place near Ribeira that showed photographs. No appointment, no portfolio binder, just the prints in a folder under my arm. The woman behind the desk looked at them for a long time and then asked what the blue was. That was it. She gave me a wall in a group show that autumn.
I think about that often, how little prepared I was and how much it worked because I was just carrying the actual work, not a plan.
So I want to hear yours. How did the first one happen? Cold email, a friend, an open call, a walk-in like mine? And was it luck or did you do the work to be there that day?
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Mine wasn't a gallery at all, it was a little library branch outside town that let me hang quilts along the back wall for a Black History Month program, maybe fifteen years back. One of the ladies who worked there kept saying people needed to see them, and I kept saying they're just quilts, honey. She won that argument. A woman came through from a gallery in Birmingham, stood in front of my grandmother's pattern for a long while, and asked me whose hands made it.
I don't think you can plan your way into that. You just carry the work and let it speak, like you did with them wet prints. The blue did the talking for you and I love that.
"They're just quilts, honey." And then a stranger stands in front of your grandmother's pattern and asks whose hands made it. That is the whole thing, isn't it. The work was already finished and complete before anyone gave it a wall.
A library branch, of all places. I like that it wasn't a gallery at all. The places that say yes first are rarely the ones we expect. Mine smelled of saltwater; yours hung next to children's books. Both of them just needed someone to say the work deserved to be seen, and someone else stubborn enough to believe it.
That lady at the desk, the one who kept saying people needed to see them. She knew before you did. I think there is always one person like that, and we almost never thank them properly.
Thank you for this. It stayed with me.