How did you land your first gallery? Mine was a chai stall
The first gallery that ever showed my work, I got because I was sitting outside sketching a chai stall on the same road, and the owner came out to ask what I was doing. Three weeks later I had four watercolours on their back wall. No email, no portfolio, no plan. Just me being nosy with a sketchbook.
Since then I have emailed plenty of galleries and heard nothing back, so I genuinely don't know which way works.
Tell me how you got your first one. Email with a proper PDF, walking in with originals under your arm, an open call, a friend of a friend, or some random thing like mine. And say whether it actually led anywhere, or was a one-time thing that never repeated.
2
2commentsSaveFollow threadShare
Mine came from a shared studio, not from a gallery at all. I was renting a corner in a building with six or seven other people, and the woman two rooms down was doing the admin for a small space and needed someone to fill a hole in a group show. So it was proximity, basically. The same thing as your chai stall, just indoors.
What I would say though, and it maybe sounds obvious, is that those two routes are not the same job. The accidental one works because someone has already seen you as a person before they see you as a submission. The emailed PDF arrives as a stranger with a file attachment, and most galleries are not set up to care about strangers. It is not that email never works, it is that it works with a different kind of space, the ones with open calls and actual procedures, and people keep sending the cold approach to galleries that only ever take work from people they already know.
I do not think there is one way that works. I think there are two economies and artists keep using the language of one while living in the other. Which gallery was it, out of curiosity? The kind of space matters more than the method.
The "seen as a person first" thing is what I keep coming back to. I got one small fair spot because a woman I buy canvas off recognised me and asked, and I've sent maybe fifteen emails that got nothing. But the studio route only works if you're in a studio, and I'm at my kitchen table after the kids are down. So I don't know where that leaves people like me. Do you think it's worth paying for a shared space just for the proximity?