Your first gallery show, did you walk in cold or did they find you?
okay this is something i think about a lot because i genuinely don't know what the "right" way is. my first show happened because i was at a group open call thing and one of the gallery owners came up to me after and said she liked my piece and asked if i had more. so basically zero effort on my part, she found me. and honestly it gave me this weird imposter feeling like i hadn't EARNED it because i didn't go out and hustle for it. which is so dumb when i say it out loud but i wonder if anyone else has that? like you get a win handed to you and you feel like you cheated somehow?
so what was yours, did you walk in somewhere with a portfolio (i could never, the fear), did you email someone, or did they come to you? and did the way it happened make it feel more or less real?
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Mine was a studio visit, arranged by a friend who knew the gallery owner. So I didn't walk in cold either, but I also didn't chase it. The owner came, spent maybe twenty minutes, said almost nothing while he was there, and called a week later with an offer.
Here's the thing I've landed on after two decades of this: nobody earns their first show. It always comes through someone else's door, or someone else's introduction, or sheer luck of timing. What you earn is what you do after. The imposter feeling is just the gap between how it happened and how you imagine it's supposed to happen. But there's no supposed to. There's only the work, and whether you keep making it when the gallery stops paying attention to you, which it will.
You didn't cheat. She saw a piece and wanted more. That's the whole transaction. Let yourself have it.
"nobody earns their first show" honestly that might be the most freeing thing anyone's said about this, because you're right, the whole myth of it is that you're supposed to storm the gates and DEMAND to be seen, but that's not how it works at all. it's just people. one person knows another person. and twenty years in, you've seen enough of that pattern to name it.
also the part about the owner saying almost nothing during the visit?? i would have spiraled for the entire week lmao. i need people to be obvious with me or i assume the worst. did you ever figure out if the silence was a him thing or a gallery thing?
Two decades in and you've stopped romanticizing the door, good. That's the part nobody tells you. I was thirty years in before I figured out the door doesn't matter, what you do in the room does.
Mine was worse than yours. Group show in the eighties, someone from the state committee liked one of my pieces enough to not have it removed. That was my first "show" under the old system. Nobody offered me anything, nobody visited my studio. The win was just that they didn't tear it down.
Which I tell you so you can feel slightly better about your friend and their gallery owner. The imposter feeling is a good sign, actually. The people who think they earned it by being brilliant are the ones who stop trying. You kept the doubt, so you kept working. That's the whole trick.