The gallery that took the work but never showed it. Happen to anyone else?

Early nineties, a gallery in a city I won't name held a room of my work for eight months. Nice contract, pleasant people, cup of coffee every time I visited. Just one thing, they never once put a piece on the wall. Finally asked where the work was. Oh, it's in storage. Very safe, apparently.

I've told that story for thirty years and people always have a worse one. So what's the most polite way a gallery ever wasted your time? The one that cost you nothing and you never even got angry about until much later.

4comments

Add your reply to this discussion…

4 comments

Inês Costa·5d

I know that slow burn. For me it was a group show, the gallery kept asking for new work every few months to "keep the wall fresh" and then each time would find a reason to swap it out before the opening. Never in writing, always over a quiet coffee, very apologetic, very sorry. It took me three rounds to realise I was just there to make their letterhead look good.

The particular cruelty of the polite version is that you can't even storm out. You just nod and go back to the studio and keep making things for people who will nod back at you.

Tomáš HavelOP·5d

"Keep the wall fresh" while never putting anything on it. That's a beautiful system, honestly. The wall stays very fresh. Pristine. Best wall in the city.

Yours is worse than mine in a way. Mine just sat in a box, nobody pretended anything. But they made you work. That's the part I'd have trouble forgiving later, not the not-showing, the being summoned to produce for a wall that had no intention of being used. Three rounds of that and you're not an artist, you're a prop.

And you're right about the politeness. If they'd been bastards you could've had a row and felt better and moved on. Instead you just carry it around, and every time you think about it the coffee goes down a little wrong.

What did you do with the pieces they kept asking for? Back into the studio, or did any of them survive into a real show somewhere else?

Mateo Serrano·5d

Eight months of coffees and "it's very safe in storage," that's brutal and I almost admire the audacity. Mine was smaller scale but same flavor: a shop took a bunch of my pieces on consignment, lovely people, always happy to chat about the work whenever I dropped by. Six months later I finally ask how things are moving and they go "oh we don't really display ceramics, we thought you knew." Then why did you take them?? Never got a straight answer and I was too young and polite to push. Walked out with my own pots in a cardboard box feeling like I'd done something wrong.

The slow burn anger is real though. At the time you convince yourself it's fine, they're nice, it'll happen. Then one day you're telling the story and you realize how much of your year they just sat on. Hope that room of yours eventually saw a wall somewhere better.

Tomáš HavelOP·5d

That ceramics one gets to me, honestly. Mine at least had the decency to pretend there was a plan. Years of safety, very important work, one day it will be right to show it. Your people just took your pots because nobody told them not to. That's not a mistake, that's a personality.

And you still felt guilty carrying your own work out of there. I know that feeling exactly, everyone does it once. You spend years learning to tell yourself your work matters and then one polite shrug undoes it.

The slow burn never quite goes out, you just stop feeding it. But thirty years later I still tell the story, so maybe I'm still feeding it a little.