How to Confidently Put Together a Successful Art Show

Hello, my friends, it's Antrese and welcome to another episode of the Savvy Painter Podcast. In this episode, we are going to talk about how to put together a show. This is fresh on my mind because lately in Growth Studio, which is my monthly membership program, we've been having some really deep discussions about showing your work.

If you are planning a show or you have a show coming up, this episode's for you. If you're not showing your work yet, this will be a great introduction for you so that when you do show your work, when you are ready for this, you're already one step ahead.

I'm going to break down the steps and give you some things to think about and also give you some practical tactical tips so that your show is a lot less stressful. How does that sound? Sounds good? I've also made you a cheat sheet just to make it a little bit easier for you. You can find the link to get the cheat sheet in the show notes for this episode. I just want to make this as easy for you as possible.

If you're new to the podcast, welcome. If you're a long-time listener, welcome back. Savvy Painter is the podcast for artists who want practical, tactical tips to create a meaningful art practice that is fulfilling and supports you.

It's a unique and powerful community of artists who are actively growing their art business without the ick. I don't know how else to say it. Without the ick. Okay, let's jump into this episode.

This is what I've noticed. So many artists are so focused on getting a show and painting the paintings to get the show and to get the attention of either a gallery or to get into an art fair or any type of show.

They're so focused on the painting and the painting and the painting and the painting that when they do get into the show, they're instantly overwhelmed by all the bits and pieces that go into making a great event for themselves.

This happened to one of my private clients recently and it's been a recurring topic in Growth Studio, so I thought I would share these tips with you, figured everybody can use them. Because when you have a plan and you have a template that leaves you prepared, it obliterates a lot of the pre-show jitters.

Things like, “Am I going to have enough paintings? What if nobody comes? What if everybody comes? What am I supposed to do? What's the gallery supposed to do? How does this all work?” All of these answered questions spinning around in your head while you're trying to get the paintings ready can be an absolute nightmare. I personally would much rather you be in a place where you have certainty and confidence around your show.

All of those old stressed-out feelings that you had had about showing your work can just dissolve away and disappear. Because you want all of your energy going into your work and into creating a successful show where you can relax and enjoy it all. Who doesn't want that?

Okay. Let's make this happen. I'm going to share with you my techniques, what's worked really well for me and for my clients. Step one is to envision the show. I always start there because I want my show, I want your show to be exactly what we envision or as close to it as we can.

Part of this is about keeping yourself in the decision-making process and keeping yourself in a very empowered position. It's really important to me in general that artists are empowered. That's why I like to start with this envisioning of what it is you want the show to be like.

If you sit down and close your eyes and really think about “What do you want to happen at this show?” Now, I know that for a lot of you, the first thing you're going to say is, “I want to sell out all my paintings.”

Let's just start with what happens when you walk into your show opening night. Sit down and really envision that. I want you to put as much detail as you possibly can. Imagine walking into the space where you're showing your work. Look around. Who do you see? What do you see? How is your work displayed? What is the framing like? What are the people like?

Just take a look around and envision everything in absolute detail. I think it's really helpful sometimes to use all of your senses because sometimes that brings in more ideas for you. You might start off by envisioning just looking around like I just described. What are you seeing? How does the space look? How many people are there? What is around you? Are there tables? Is there anything that you're seeing that contributes to this show that you want, to the vibe that you want, to the experience you want?

Then I want you to envision, what do you hear? People chatting. What are they talking about? What are they responding to? Is there music? Is there anything else that you're hearing? Just take a few minutes and just pay attention to everything that you hear in this exhibit of yours. Then think about what do you taste? What do you smell? Every single thing. It might seem a little silly, but some of it might seem a little bit overkill for some people if you're not accustomed to doing vision work. But what all we're doing here is pulling in all of your senses so that you can imagine and be in that place.

That's always my first step. Now, why do we do this? Partly, it is to create the feeling in your body of what it's like to have this really successful show. Because that's what you're imagining. You're imagining all of the paintings are up. All the people are there. They're laughing. They're talking. They're looking around. They're enjoying themselves. They might be having conversations. What are they talking about?

All of these things that you're envisioning, we're going to use those as clues as to how to organize and create it. Because the first step in creating anything is to envision it. Take the time to do that. Then once you have envisioned the show down to the minutia, down to all the details, then what I do is I just write it all down. I take everything that I saw and I turn it into a list.

If I think about looking around the show, I think about, “What did I see?” Well, I saw all these paintings hanging on the wall. How were they hung on the wall? I'm going to make this list and I'm going to start backwards engineering.

The obvious thing is there are paintings on the wall. How did they get there? What do they look like? Are they framed? How are they hung? Who hung them? I just work backwards from there. Then I look around at the people there and I think to myself, “How did all these people get here? Who invited them? Did I invite all of them? Did the gallery invite all of them?”

I just make this list and I just start asking those types of questions like, “What is there and how did it get there? If I don't know, then it's okay. I still write it down. We'll come back to that if you don't know or you're not sure.

Okay, so going through everything you saw, everything you heard, everything that you smelled. Was there food there? Was that what you smelled? Was there music playing? Where was the music coming from? Was it live music? Was it a playlist? You're going to write all of that down because it's important. Every single thing that you imagined.

With this list, you're going to backwards engineer it. Then you're going to start asking yourself questions, those questions, “How did it get there?” If you think about your friends and your family, you invited them.

On your list, you're going to write down, “Invite friends and family.” If there was music and it was a playlist, you're going to notice that there were speakers involved. There was a stereo system. The music was played from something. What was that? What's your best guess? Write that down.

You're going to take all of this and make a list. Like the food. If there was food there, how were people eating the food? Was there a table? Was there somebody serving the food? Was it buffet style? Was it just sitting out? Was it free? Were they buying it? How did you envision it?

Just really imagine this as like, “What is my best-case scenario? How do I want this to be?” Now, after you have all of that, we can start to break it down and really think about, “Okay, these are all the things that I envisioned,” and then start figuring out how it got there.

From that, now, depending on the structure of the show, you might then decide you're going to have a conversation with the people involved. For example, if you're showing at a gallery, then what I do is I say, "Okay, here's what I want to happen." Then I go have a conversation with the gallery and I say, "Hey, here's what I'm imagining for this show. What are your thoughts about it?"

I get their feedback, and we start to have the conversation about what am I going to do? What are you willing to do and what will I be responsible for? It's unlikely, sometimes it is, and sometimes you get lucky. I've been really lucky before when I was just like, “Hey, here's what I want to do,” and they're like, “Awesome. Great. How do we help you do that?” And we had an amazing show.

Sometimes you might have to negotiate with them or they're going to say, “Hey, here are the things that we can do. These other things, we're not willing to do that.” Then you get to decide how important are those things.

I like to have the conversation first and say, “Hey, here's what I'm envisioning. How can we make this happen? How can we partner together and make this happen?” That might be a gallery setting. It might be an event setting. It depends on where your show is.

From that conversation, you'll get a really clear picture of what's realistic, what you can do, and with that information, I might then come back and be like, “Okay, this piece is completely doable. This piece is completely doable. This one's a little bit of a stretch, but I'm willing to put in the work to make that happen,” or, “This one's a bit of a stretch and I just don't see it making an impact on the show itself. It's nice to have, I'm just going to let it go.”

Right then and there I start to eliminate and I start to adjust things according to the conversation that I might have just had. Now that's if you're working with somebody else. If it's entirely up to you, you're just going to roll right into this next step.

The next thing you want to do is take a look at your list. Start to flesh it out. What is everything that needs to happen before that? We'll start with the simplest thing. There are paintings hung on the wall.

If you were to backwards engineer that, the way that I do that is I see paintings hanging on the wall. Who hung them? Was that me or was that somebody from the gallery? If it's somebody from the gallery, then I might have the question of, “How did they know where to hang them?” Did they decide or did I decide?

The answer to that question becomes an item on my to-do list. Decide if it's me, the item on my to-do list is decide what paintings go where. Decide the layout. If it is the gallery, it might be coordinate, it might be draw out a map of where the paintings go.

If you're not sure if they are going to do it or you're going to do it, then the item on the to-do list becomes “Ask how the paintings are going to be hung.” If you know the answer, it becomes an item on your to-do list. If you don't know the answer, asking the question becomes an item on your to-do list.

I would just collect all the questions for the gallery or for the event space and put that into a document, and I would probably meet with them and ask them all of these questions. Another example is when you envisioned your show, you saw all these people. How did they get there? Who invited them?

If it is the gallery or the event space, do they need a list from you? If you invited them, then how did you invite them? What are all the ways that you can invite somebody to your show?

In-person invitations. Saying, "Hey, I have a show, do you want to come?" That could be postcards, that could be emails, that could be social media posts, it could be several of these or all of these so you would write all of those things down.

You just keep iterating on this, everything that you saw, you just keep asking these questions, how did it get there and who did it? If you don't know, it becomes a question. You're just going to write this long list and don't worry if it seems too long.

On your first pass, I would just write everything down and then I would slowly go through the process of honing it down and how do we hone it down? Well, part of the honing of it down will be, again, the examples, if you're working with a gallery or with an event space, they may have limitations and you're going to be really flexible with that.

Everything that you see is everything that you want and you are going to decide how important is this to the success of the show, how important is this to me to have this and that's how you'll decide how to negotiate with them or what are the things that you would want to push back back on or what are the things that you'd want to say, "Hey, this is really important to me. I'm willing to take on all of the work to make sure that it happens. Are you cool with that?"

Of course, you're going to be flexible with their answers. I always think about it like, “I'm having this show with this event space, with this gallery, and they're my partners in this so I'm going to communicate with them.” I often over-communicate, and that's how I typically do it, so that there are a few surprises for me and few surprises for them. We want to keep all of that to a minimum.

Now, the next step is no matter what their answer is, I always do a gut check. I want to be really truthful with myself about “What am I willing to do? How much effort am I willing to put into this where I'm not going to feel resentful at the end of it?” I always want to be brutally honest about that.

Some galleries are going to be really happy to work with you. Other galleries are just going to take their hands up and be like, “Okay, whatever you want to do, you go for it, but we're just going to give you the space.” I've got a lot of questions about that type of gallery, but that's okay. That's not for this episode.

So, I'm going to do my gut check and my gut check typically is A, am I willing to do this? If it falls all on me, do I want the results of this bad enough that I'm willing to put the work in for it?

A lot of times, that's a yes. Sometimes I'm like, “Yeah, I don't think that that much work for that particular thing is worth it. Of course, I'm also going to be considering how much time I have with all of this.”

So that might be a piece too, that in order to get that result that I was envisioning, I'm going to have to put an enormous amount of time into it and I just don't want to invest that time into this at this moment, maybe another show. You want to make sure that you do that step of reality checking it for yourself.

Then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to take every single one of those items and now that I've had that thought process, I'm going to put my best guess on my list right next to it. I'm going to put my best guess of how long it will take me to do this?” Sometimes I don't know exactly, but I'm going to make my best educated guess and that's good enough to start with.

Then the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start putting it on my calendar. Typically what I do is I will block things into milestones, which might look like paintings are ready to hang. Then there are tons of subtasks that I know are involved in that, but I'm going to just make sure that painting's ready to hang is going to happen.

Let's say the event is three months now, I want to have all of the paintings completely ready to hang by the week before the show. Let's say that is my date. Then I also am going to have a milestone like invitation sent out. That might be two weeks before the show. I'm just going to block all that stuff in and I'm going to chunk together things that go together.

That might look like writing social media posts, I'm going to block all that together so, it happens in the same time period, like the same week, for example. In general, the way that I think about it is big broad strokes, big milestone, like I mentioned, for things that are far away, by far away, I mean like a month or two months out.

I simply have “This milestone is complete,” and then for the week ahead, I will have on my calendar the minutiae of it, that down to on Tuesday, I'm going to write the email to the gallery asking all of these questions and I will do that at 1:00 PM on Tuesday. Very clear what I'm going to do and what I'm going to create.

I have listed everything out, I have estimated how long it will take me to do it, and I have blocked in the big pieces, and I have broken down the immediate pieces, the things that are in the next week or two.

Putting it on my calendar is crucial because I'm deciding ahead of time when I'm going to get these things done. What that does is it takes all of those little tasks out of my brain and puts them onto the calendar. I'm basically telling my brain, “Don't worry, I've got you, all those little details are covered and there's a specific time that I will get that done.”

Then every single week, I'm just looking ahead and saying, “Okay, what's the next milestone? What do I need to do next?” Then I'm blocking that out for the week. I don't go further out than a week because things change and life happens so I don't want to have to redo the plan a hundred times. I just know that during this week, I will get these things done. Then by the end of the next month, these are the things that will be done.

So every week, let's say on Monday, I just sit down and I'm like, “Okay, here's all the things I'm going to do. Here's when I'm going to do them. I'm looking at that list that I have and I'm just dropping it into my calendar.”

Then I don't worry about it. All I have to do is what's on the calendar. It takes all that spinning energy out of my head and I can just consistently know that, “Okay, it's happening, I've got this covered, I've thought about that, it's done,” and if I'm doing something and I think, “Oh, wait, I need to add this,” then I will just take out that to-do list and write it down but I commit to doing what I said I would do this week.

So I won't think of something and then be like, “Oh, my god, I need to do that right now.” I'll just add it to the list and then the following Monday when I'm making my plan for that week, I will decide if it needs to happen now or under which milestone it goes so that I'm not distracted.

Those of you who've worked with me, you know I'm pretty detail-oriented. So when I say I plan this out, I will do things like I will draw out the space of the gallery and decide where the paintings go. I will calculate the width of the wall and decide what are the sizes of the paintings and how many paintings are going to be there including the framing on it.

So I might know that in general, I have a two inch frame and let's say for example that my paintings are 12 inches wide, then I know that the painting is going to be 12 plus 4 so it's going to be 16 inches and I'm also deciding what is the spacing between each of the paintings.

I actually decide those things out. All of that goes onto my calendar. What that does is I just know that everything is covered, everything's taken care of. It's like a fun little game. When you plan this, when you put this together, what it does is it constrains the time that you're working on the show itself.

It allows you to say, “Okay, so I know in general that I'm going to work on this for three hours during the day and then the rest of the day, my mind is free to work on paintings or my mind is free to do whatever else that I have on the schedule.”

It just prevents these constant spins, worry, and anxiety around the show because I'm just consistently telling my brain, “Nope, we got this. It's out of my head and onto a calendar.”

Trust me, that is a huge, huge relief. Let's talk about the elephant in the room. I know a lot of artists don't like to plan to that much detail, and it's a struggle. It's a struggle to make those decisions and to stick to the plan once you have it.

A lot of artists will tell me, "I don't want to do a schedule, I don't even use a calendar." Then I work with them and they start to notice that, “Wow, it is such a huge relief when I have everything calendered out, when I know what's going to happen when.” Because it allows you to see for sure what you can get done in a given week.

So if your plans are way too big for the time you have, you're going to be able to see that. Then you can make educated decisions about what it is that you are going to take out so that you're not just in this constant state of overwhelm. You know what fits and you know how much you need to let go of. Then you have a plan for how that is going to happen.

That is how to plan for a show. First, you're going to envision it, then you're going to backwards engineer it, and then you're going to put it on your calendar. This is what allows your brain to relax and focus on what you're doing now instead of spinning out.

Now we started this by imagining the possibility of your show, what could be, what might be there. What would you want to see there? What would you consider a successful show?

Now imagine that the show has happened. Imagine that you did all this and that you decided ahead of time what your show was going to be like. You had the conversations, you broke it down, you backwards engineered it, you did all the things.

Imagine the show has happened exactly the way that you imagined it would. Imagine seeing yourself after the show, having done all of this. Just try on that feeling and see what it's like. That feeling of having accomplished it, being absolutely confident in your show, of having done all the things, and having had shown up the way that you want to show up.

It's a beautiful, beautiful feeling. You can experience that ahead of time just by using that movie theater in your brain to show you what you want to see, what you want to happen. It plants the seeds for you to know that this is possible for you and to know that you can create the show that you want.

So often, we're envisioning what we don't want or what we're afraid to happen. So this is one way that you can rewire your brain to start focusing on what you do want to happen so that you're better able to see the possibility, so that you're better able to see everything that is available to you in abundance. Okay, I'm going to end this episode there. Have an amazing week and I will talk to you soon.

If you want to take what you are learning here on the Savvy Painter Podcast even further, join us in Growth Studio. Growth Studio is a unique community of artists. We meet multiple times a week for live coaching, critiques, and demos. Just go to savvypainter.com/join.