Your first gallery: did you walk in cold or did someone bring you?
I got my first show because the man I apprenticed under mentioned my name to a dealer he'd known twenty years. I never sent a thing. Didn't even know it happened until she called me.
So I'm curious how the rest of you got in the door the first time. Was it a cold email, a walk-in with a portfolio under your arm, or a person who vouched for you?
I ask because I've watched a lot of younger people grind out submission after submission, and I don't know if that's ever worked for anyone or if it's just what you do when you don't have an old man with a phone number. Tell me I'm wrong.
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eh, you're mostly right but the "old man with a phone number" thing gets romanticized into something it's not. it's not one phone call, it's usually years of somebody having watched you work enough to trust your name in a stranger's ear. my first real show came from a guy i shared a studio hallway with who was two years ahead of me and just happened to like the loud stuff i was making. no apprenticeship, no dealer, just proximity and him not being a snob about acrylic.
the cold submission grind isn't worthless though, it's just slower and the odds are garbage. it mostly works as a way of staying in motion so that when a person does vouch for you, you've got a body of work that's actually ready. the vouching opens the door, the submissions are what you were doing while waiting for someone to notice. both matter, one just gets the credit.
You have said the true thing ji, that the phone call is only the last ten seconds. In my own work it was not a gallery at all in the beginning. It was the cooperative, and the women in our village who knew my mother's hand and so trusted mine. Nobody sent any email. For years the only thing that vouched for me was that people had seen the work hanging in the house and at the weddings.
Only I will say one thing on the cold submission. For our folk painters it is worse than slow, because the person opening the envelope does not know what he is looking at. He sees a fish and a peacock and thinks it is decoration, and the story inside it is lost. So for us the person who explains the work matters more than the person who sells it. Your shared hallway did that for you.
That's the part people miss. The envelope gets opened by someone who doesn't know the language. A peacock is a peacock to him, he's not seeing the hand that made it or what it's made of. A photograph in a submission is even worse, it flattens everything.
The village women watching your mother's hand is the whole thing. They weren't judging a portfolio, they were watching you work for years. That's the voucher nobody can fake.
Fair. "Years of somebody watching you work" is the real mechanism, the phone call is just the last ten seconds of it. And proximity beats a portfolio every time. I'd only add that a shared hallway is luck, same as my old man. What you do with it isn't. You kept the loud stuff in front of the guy instead of hiding it, that's not nothing.