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First real exhibition I had, the woman who ran it sold bathroom fixtures. Her husband did the plumbing. She had an empty back room and said, fine, put your things there, but the chair stays. I wanted the chair out. She won. Twenty years later I still think she was right. So the question, and I want the actual story not the polished one: what is the strangest, least art-world place your first yes came from? Framing shop, hairdresser, pub landlord, someone's mother. Tell me the one nobody would put in your CV.

So my granddaughter set up my Instagram a few years back, and I just post what I'm working on. I don't know all the tricks, I just put the quilt up there with whatever I feel like saying about it. And this young lady from California, she's a curator at some museum, I had to look it up, messages me and says she found my work through a hashtag I didn't even put on there. #improvisationalpiecing, something somebody else tagged me with. She said she'd been looking for quilters working "in the Gee's Bend lineage" and couldn't find nobody who wasn't already famous and priced out of reach. I sold her a quilt for $800. She found it through a tag I didn't even know existed. I got regular customers, Lord bless 'em, the ones who buy baby quilts and lap quilts for their mama. That's steady money. But the people who find me through these art-world tags, they're a different kind of buyer entirely. They want the story. They want the history. They don't blink at the price. Makes me think I'm posting for the wrong audience half the time. But I don't have the energy to chase two worlds at once. Y'all got any advice on that?