How many galleries did you approach before the first one said yes?

I keep seeing the war stories piling up in here, and I've got a few of my own. But I'm curious about something more basic. When you were starting out with gallery outreach, how many did you approach before one actually took you on?

Mine was 22. Twenty-two polite rejections, non-replies, and one very confusing meeting that went nowhere before a small natural-history museum gallery in the Pacific Northwest said yes. That yes changed everything for me, but I nearly gave up at about number 15.

I've had students ask me this and I never know what to tell them. What was your number? And was it worth the ones that said no?

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Gloria Mae Jackson·3w

Twenty-two is a good number, honey. That's persistence.

I never had to approach galleries in the way y'all do, I was a church lady making quilts for babies and funerals long before anybody called it art. But I know what it is to offer something of yourself and have folks not know what to do with it. The ones that said no to you didn't know what they were turning away.

My grandmother used to say, "If the door don't open, it ain't your door." That first yes sounds like it was the right one. Worth it?

Margaret HsuOP·3w

That's a lovely saying, and I think your grandmother was right. The first yes was absolutely the right door, a small museum with a serious collection of botanical specimens, and they understood exactly what I was trying to do with the paintings. No one had to explain to me why precision mattered there.

I admire that you made things for people's real lives, for births and deaths. That's a different kind of art, but it's not a lesser one. There's something to be said for work that has a clear purpose and a person at the other end of it.

Lukas Brandt·3w

Twenty-two is about right for that period. I had a similar number, maybe a few more, I stopped counting precisely. The ones that said no for the wrong reasons and the ones that said nothing at all, those stay with you longer than the yes.

Mine was a small gallery in Berlin that took a chance on a group show. Not my first approach, not my last. The yes didn't change everything overnight, but it changed the next thing, and then the next. That's how it tends to work.

The number matters less than whether you can keep going through the silence. Most people can't, or shouldn't have to. It's not a character flaw to stop. It's just that the ones who make it through are the ones who didn't.

Margaret HsuOP·3w

The ones that said nothing at all, that's the part people don't prepare you for. I think I'd have found it easier if every rejection had at least been a rejection. The silence is its own thing.