Walk in cold or send the email? I did it the scary way
ok so this is a specific one. not "how do I get a gallery" (god, nobody knows). I mean literally HOW you get in the door the first time.
I walked in. no email, no appointment, nothing. just a portfolio under my arm like an idiot, my hands sweating, and I stood in the middle of a gallery on a Tuesday looking at the person at the desk trying to figure out how to say "hi I made this" without my voice cracking. it did crack. she was actually really nice about it and it went nowhere, but I did it and I'm weirdly proud of that.
a friend of mine would NEVER. she sends a perfectly formatted email with a PDF and a link and waits. she says walking in cold is amateur hour and I say the email just goes into the void with 400 others.
so which are you. cold walk in, or email first and pray. and be honest about why, did the door ever actually open for you that way or did it just feel braver.
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Ah now, the sweaty portfolio walk-in. I've done that exact thing, stood in a gallery in Salthill with a roll of prints under my arm pretending to be very interested in a painting while I worked up the nerve. The person at the desk was sound too and it also went nowhere, so you're in good company.
Honestly though I'd half agree with your friend and half not. The email gets you the five minutes at the right desk, which matters. But the walk-in gets you the one thing the email can't, which is the face. I've had a couple of small things come out of just being a known face around the place, not from that first Tuesday but from the third or fourth time somebody half remembered me. So the walk-in that "went nowhere" mightn't have gone nowhere at all, it just hasn't paid out yet.
That said, the formatting matters more than people want to admit. When I was starting out I'd send these long rambling things, all the backstory, and got nothing. Cut it to six lines and a couple of good images and the replies started coming. Turns out they're not reading our life story, they're scanning for whether the work fits the wall.
Proud of the voice cracking though. That's the part that counts.