okay but HOW did you get your first gallery to say yes? I'm still at the email-and-sweat stage

I need to hear actual stories because I'm stuck in the worst loop: I write a nice short email, attach three images, hit send, and then refresh my inbox like a maniac for six days.

so for the people who've actually gotten in somewhere, how did it happen? cold email? walked in with a portfolio? open call? someone's cousin?

mine: I got one real reply ever, from a small space two towns over, and honestly I think it was because I mentioned I'd seen their last show in person and said one specific thing about a piece I liked. that's it. that's my whole strategy so far, and it's not exactly a strategy.

did any of you get in WITHOUT a connection? because I keep hearing "just know someone" and it's making me want to scream into a pillow. tell me your first yes, I need hope 🥲

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Roman Petrak·2w

The one reply you got is the whole answer. You saw the show in person and said something specific about a piece. That's not a strategy, that's just paying attention, and it beats a hundred cold emails with three jpegs attached. I've had work in maybe six galleries over thirty years and not one came from an email. Two came from a fabricator I shared a shop with who knew a dealer. One came because I walked in with a maquette and a stone sample and the owner happened to be standing there. The rest were people who'd seen the actual object somewhere and tracked me down.

Nobody can tell anything from a photograph. A photo of steel tells you it's steel. It doesn't tell them the weld is clean or the thing weighs nine hundred pounds and stands on its own. If you can get the work in front of a body once, do that instead of the sixth follow up. And drop the six day refresh. They either looked or they didn't.

Dani OkaforOP·2w

okay the fabricator detail is what's going to keep me up tonight, because I've been treating this like a solo sport and you're basically saying it's a relationship graph. my partner keeps telling me the same thing about their job and I keep ignoring it lol.

and "people who'd seen the actual object" is the part that stings in a good way, because watercolor is SO bad in a jpeg. my whole medium is about how the paper catches light in person and I'm out here emailing flattened scans like that's going to convince anyone.

so a genuine question, because I have no idea how this works for 3D work: when someone tracked you down, was it usually through an open studio or a show, or did they literally just find you through some other artist? I'm trying to figure out where the actual object even gets seen by the right people when you don't have a dealer yet. thirty years is a lot of data and I'm taking notes over here 🙏

Karen Wessel·2w

Honestly the gallery thing I have zero experience with, I've only ever sold at local fairs and a couple of coffee shop walls, so take this with a grain of salt. But the loop you're describing sounds a lot like my first two years of trying to get into juried shows. Same refresh-the-inbox thing, ha.

What finally worked for me was way less impressive than a cold email: I just kept showing up. Went to the openings at one small space near me, talked to whoever was standing around, eventually the person running it knew my face and my work. Took like a year. Not saying that's a strategy either, but the reply you got kind of proves the same point, the in-person part is doing the heavy lifting.

Also curious, how many places are you emailing at once? When I was doing one at a time I'd obsess over every one. Sending a batch and forgetting about it saved my sanity.

Dani OkaforOP·2w

okay wait the "kept showing up" thing is genuinely the most useful thing anyone's said on this thread, and it's also the thing I least want to hear because it takes a YEAR, haha. a whole year of going to openings and being the person awkwardly holding a plastic cup of bad white wine in the corner. but you're right that it's the same muscle as the juried shows thing. my "strategy" so far has basically been spray-and-pray emails to strangers, which is the exact opposite of letting one person get to know your face.

and honestly the coffee shop walls aren't nothing?? like you've had work out in the world where people could buy it, that's more than a lot of people can say. what kind of stuff do you show at the fairs? I'm curious if the work you sell in person is the same work you'd send to a gallery or if you make a totally different thing for that setting, because I've been kinda wrestling with that.

Dani OkaforOP·2w

okay but the "kept showing up" thing, I want to push back a tiny bit because I think people hear it as "go be a warm body in a room" and that's the part that wastes the year. like, I did the openings thing too, and for months it did nothing, and then I figured out the difference: I stopped going to openings and started going on the dead afternoons. Tuesday, like 2pm, when the person actually running the space is at the desk and bored and there's nobody to perform for. that's when you get to talk about the work instead of shouting over a wine table. got my first real studio visit invite out of a Tuesday.

the juried show loop you're describing though, ugh, I know that refresh-the-inbox feeling in my bones. did you find the fairs at least taught you anything about pricing, or was that a whole separate disaster? I'm eight months into full-time and still flinch quoting numbers.