I got my first gallery because I helped hang a show there for free. How did yours actually happen?

My first gallery came from being useful, not from a submission. I was 27, I had nothing on the walls anywhere, and a small space in the sixth arrondissement needed hands to hang a group show. I did it for nothing, three days, and at the end the director looked at a small panel I'd brought along "just in case" and gave me a wall in the next show.

Not romantic. Not a discovery story. Just proximity and a bit of unpaid labour, which is c'est ça for most of us I think.

So: how did your first one actually happen? Not how you'd advise someone to do it. The real version. A friend's cousin? A bar owner who had empty walls? Did you email forty times, or did you walk in with a wet panel under your arm?

I ask because I have students who believe there's one correct method, and I'm fairly sure there isn't. Tell me yours. The messier the better.

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Elin Holm·3w

Mine wasn't a gallery exactly. A small project space in Majorna had a group show and the person curating it was a conservator I'd worked with. She needed someone to mount about forty loose sheets, so I did that, and she put two of my pieces in the corner of the same show. No submission, no statement, just a favour that turned into a wall. I think proximity is underrated and most people want a nicer origin story than that.

The unpaid part still sits a bit wrong with me though. Useful is not the same as fair. I got lucky that the useful thing and the work were close enough together that nobody had to pretend.

Inês Costa·3w

The unpaid part sitting wrong is the honest part, I think. Most of us file it under "how it is" and move on, and then none of it changes.

My own version: a small place here in Porto, I spent a summer printing their whole season of posters for the price of the paper. At the end the woman running it gave me a back wall in October, and I was so grateful I did not ask a single question about it. Years later I wonder what I would have asked, if I had not needed it so badly.

Forty loose sheets, though. That is a lot of patience.

Camille LaurentOP·3w

"I did not ask a single question about it", that sentence is doing a lot of work. I recognise it exactly. When you need the wall, you take the wall and you say thank you, and the questions arrive about five years too late, when you no longer need anything and can finally afford to be difficult.

What I would have asked, in your place: who pays for the paper next time. Because if the answer was always going to be you, then it was never a favour, it was a job with no invoice.

Forty sheets was patience. Printing a whole season is closer to a small apprenticeship.

Camille LaurentOP·3w

Majorna, so Gothenburg. Mounting forty loose sheets is real work, and people who have never done it think it's just tape and a level.

You're right that useful isn't fair. I don't have a clean answer. What I noticed in my own case: the hanging was the audition, whether anyone called it that or not. They watch how you handle someone else's work before they trust you with your own. Which is a rotten system and also, annoyingly, not stupid.

Bof. I don't defend it. I just stopped pretending it was something else.

Ramesh Jha·3w

Your story is honest, and I respect that you are not dressing it up. Myself Ramesh, Mithila painting from Madhubani. My first was not a gallery in the proper sense. A cooperative in Patna was taking work from our village to sell for a festival, and my mother sent two of my paintings along with her own. They sold, and then the same society kept asking. Later the government handicraft board put our work in a show in Delhi, and that is how people outside Bihar first saw it. So mine also came from someone already inside the door, not from any application. In our tradition this is normal, the art passes through family and community, not through portfolios. But I will say one thing, the unpaid part worries me. In the city it may be a stepping stone, but for our women here it becomes the habit, working for nothing because we are told it is exposure. That is the part I would like to see change, without losing the closeness that got us there in the first place. 🙏

Camille LaurentOP·3w

Ramesh, this is the one that stays with me. Your mother sent your paintings with her own, that is the whole thing in one gesture. Not the society, not Delhi. Her hand carrying yours into the room.

And what you say at the end, that in the tradition it is normal for the art to pass through the family, I think we lost something when we made it into a career instead. I trained in an atelier so I know the apprenticeship version, work passed from one pair of hands to the next, and I still think we talk about it as if the only honest path is the cold submission. It never was.

Madhubani has lines that don't forgive a wrong move, no? All that flat colour and then the line has to be certain. I would like to see what your mother painted.