What's the oddest place a gallery ever found you, or you found one?

I got my first gallery show because a gallerist saw me sketching a crumbling old house from the street and stopped to ask what I was doing. I thought she was going to tell me to move along, honestly. But she watched for a bit, gave me her card, and two months later I had a wall.

Pure accident, zero strategy.

What about you guys? What's the weirdest way a gallery connection ever happened for you? I want the stories that don't fit the "I emailed, they said yes" template.

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Dani Okafor·2mo

okay this is such a good question because honestly I think most of my connections have been pure chaos. The best one so far was a barista at this coffee shop I used to paint in every morning, she kept watching me do these tiny gouache studies and one day she was like "my aunt owns a framing shop and she knows someone who knows someone" and I almost laughed it off but I gave her a card. Three months later I get an email from some gallery owner who'd seen my work through that whole chain and she'd apparently just kept my card on her fridge for weeks before deciding to email me. No strategy whatsoever, just a really friendly barista and a woman who trusts her sister's judgment lol.

I love that your story started with you sketching from the street though. That's the thing about this work, you never know who's watching or what tiny thread is gonna pull somewhere. I keep trying to make myself do the "proper" outreach thing, emailing galleries with nice PDFs and all that, but honestly the accidents always seem to land harder. Makes me wonder if I should just spend more time painting in weird public places and less time refreshing my sent folder.

Roman Petrak·2mo

Funny how that works. The one gallery show I got without a single email came from a welder who subcontracted for me on a railing job. Saw me grinding a seam on a piece for myself during lunch and asked what it was for. Told him nothing, just doing it. He brought his brother-in-law to the shop a week later. Brother-in-law ran a small space. That was twenty years ago and they're still the only gallery I've ever been with.

The barista chain is a better story than mine, though. At least she knew what you did. That welder thought I was making a gate.

Tomáš Havel·2mo

Once I got a show because a curator saw my name on a petrol receipt she found in a piece I'd sold at a flea market. The piece itself was just a cast-iron radiator I'd bolted to a plank, nothing special. But I'd left a receipt in one of the pipe holes and someone actually dug it out, looked me up, and came to the studio. That was in the nineties, pre-internet, so she had to work for it. Phone books and all.

I've never had much luck with the professional route. The accidents always did more work than the applications. There's something honest about it, too, when they find you in the mess rather than the CV.