[PODCAST] How to Get Studio Visits Without Reading Minds

This week I'm extending a conversation I started in my revived Hyperallergic column: do you need a proper studio space to get studio visits? The answer is no—if you handle it properly.

But the real question isn't about your space. It's how to network effectively so visits actually happen. I break down the exact timing strategy for outreach, why most networking fails in the follow-through, and how to structure emails that make it easy for people to say yes.

The biggest reason artist emails don't get responses isn't disinterest—it's that the email didn't make it easy to respond. I cover four principles that change that and walk through a real scenario showing how to think strategically about follow-up.

Want the exact framework? Join me for my free webinar Monday, November 24th at 7 PM EST.

RELEVANT LINKS: 

Hyperallergic: Do I Need a Studio? 

Free Webinar Sign Up: How to Get Studio Visits Without Reading Minds

Podcast Episode 101: 

You are listening to the Art Problems Podcast, episode 101. I'm your host, Paddy Johnson. This is the podcast where we talk about how to get more shows, grants and residencies. And today I wanna extend a conversation I started on Hyperallergic this week. My art problems column has been revived. And I took the opportunity to speak about the problem of studios, specifically, whether you need one to get studio visits, and I wanted to talk about this issue in the column and on the podcast because I've been putting together a webinar on how to ask for studio visits and what to do once you have them.  

And that's happening on Monday, November 24th at 7:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. This podcast is part of my preparation for the webinar, so if you like what's here, you should definitely attend. There's a link in the show notes, and honestly, I think I've got some really helpful tips for everyone here. I'm really excited to deliver this to you.  

And I'm really excited about the talk, so I really, I really do recommend that you come. Now, the first step in the process of getting a studio visit is how to prepare for the eventuality that you'll have one, meaning if your studio spaces unsuitable for guests, are you stuck before you even start? Now in the case of a Hyperallergic article, a reader wrote, I make art on a small kitchen table in my house, which makes it difficult to invite people over for studio visits.  

I don't have the money for a dedicated studio, but I'm too embarrassed to invite curators or dealers to see my work without better viewing conditions. Also, I don't live all that close to a major city center. What can I do? Shy and living remotely. Now, I wrote about a thousand words on this, but in truth, the answer to whether you need a better studio space is really pretty straightforward.  

The answer is just no, not if you handle it properly, but let's talk about the necessary disclaimers here, because after I wrote this piece, an artist told me they had a studio where asbestos had been found, which obviously creates some problems, right? You can't invite people to a space that's a health risk.  

And that's it's, it's also not exactly unusual to live somewhere remote where no gallerist is going to visit without a pre-established relationship. And these cases, and there are others too, you're gonna have to make plans outside of the studio and you have three options. Typically, you'll be doing some combination of these options.  

You've got Zoom, traveling to a major city and finding a studio solution or a studio share solution. So the real question here actually isn't how do I turn my kitchen into a more hospitable place? Although that is one thing you have to think about. But rather, how do I network effectively? And while I got into some of this, in the peace and Hyperallergic, this is where I wanted to focus my efforts.  

Today, inside the membership, I have email templates and DM strategies you can use for outreach, which typically takes place after you've met someone. And members use these all the time. But the members who benefit the most from what we have to offer, come to the coaching calls and ask me and others questions inside the portal about their correspondence.  

And I'll tell you, this is actually my true superhero skill. I am able to figure out the exact right timing for an email and interpret even the most cryptic responses to help members get exactly what they need out of a relationship. Now, a lot of this comes from my media training where timing, the timing of a story is critical to its reception.  

You don't write a year up, year end roundup in July. No one will read it, but a good one published in December, you're gonna get a huge response. The same goes for studio requests. If you send out an email in early December requesting a studio visit, nine times outta 10, you're gonna hear radio silence. Why?  

Because it's the busiest time of year from many galleries, art Basel. Even with a reduced number of galleries participating is, you know, like that's just a really busy time of year, and for some galleries it's revenue that can keep them afloat for several months. So don't send them an email. Now it's gonna go into the email graveyard, and that's what we don't want.  

One of the reasons I create an art world calendar each year is because your contact strategy is so reliant on understanding the season, how it even helps to know what time of day to email people. Um, and the answer to that, by the way, is to schedule your email to go out when the gallery opens. So that they see it when they get in.  

It's best to send emails on Tuesday or Wednesday when people are fresher during the week. But these again, are just general, uh, general benchmarks, I think. The best thing to do is to send it rather than to not send anything at all. So if it feels like it's getting late in the week, but you just need to get it out, that's what you do.  

The last strategy call I did with members was almost all contact strategy. This strategy assumes that you're already doing some research. Because that's how you know who to contact. I recently helped an artist who in the course of doing research for residency, she would be doing, came across a show opening in 2026.  

That would be a perfect fit for her work. To send an email to a curator that's going to be effective. You have to know the approximate schedule of museum planning. Source the contact email and write what we call in the marketing world a soft asks so that you can get a response. So all of that are skills that you can build, but a lot of it also starts with the research. I did all that work with the artists and we'll see what happens. It's early days, you know that it's just sent out because even when you are a perfect fit, there are all kinds of reasons that these things might not work out, but the email was perfect. And so you also get that confidence, right?  

At the very least, this curator is now aware of the work that she wasn't aware of before, and if it doesn't work out this time, it may work out some other time. Right. And all of this is related to my next point, which is most networking fails in the follow through. And let me just say here that we are all guilty of not following up when we should.  

And you know, I am guilty of this. I have a consultant I've been meaning to follow up with for three weeks now, and I'm talking on my podcast about it rather than doing the work coordination. So we're all guilty. That said, I will say though, that now is a bad time to ask consultants for anything because it's an auction week, so I'm holding off for a reason.  

Anyway, I think I've made my point about the importance of timing with follow up. What you wanna do is make sure that you're connecting without wasting anyone's time, and this is why research is so crucial to your practice. Time more than anything else right now might be our most precious resource. Like, think about how many people, you know with free time, it's not very many of us, right?  

Like most of our hours are just fully accountable, uh, like accounted for. Those of us who have free time are often retired, and even then our days easily fill up with other tasks in part because it takes us so much longer to do the same things. So when you talk to someone, it's really important that you have a very specific reason for doing so.  

This will ensure that they not only read the email, but if you email them again, they're gonna look at that one too. So let me show you how all of this, the timing, the follow-up and the clear outcomes works together in a real scenario. So let's say you are a text-based artist and you send a gallerist, a poster in the mail you are doing so as a follow-up for an extremely complimentary words that were shared about your work about a year ago.  

You wanna keep the connection alive. So you sent the poster. You know that now is a bad time to email because it's two weeks before the art fairs start, but you also don't want them to forget about you. You don't want 'em to have sent that poster in fame. This is where we can see that the desired outcome of a studio visit, which is a long-term goal, isn't feasible as a short-term goal, but in order to achieve a long-term goal, you're gonna need an end term step, and that's the short-term goal.  

So I wanna encourage everyone to game this out with me so that you can repeat it when you need to. Every email you send should have a very specific outcome in mind, and it's not always going to be a studio visit. That's a long-term objective. In this case, the objective of the email is only to remind that person that you exist and that you will follow up another time.  

That way it's not weird when you follow up at a better time. That's a long way out from when the person would've expected a follow up. So how are you making a decision about what to write? So let's return to ideal outcomes in this case. The best case scenario is that they respond to your email. The worst case is that they don't open it, and probably what's gonna happen is something in between.  

They don't respond to the email, but they've at least seen it. So you know that you need a clear subject, and you also know that you need to include something that asks them to respond to your email. So what's a good subject? Anything that entices them to open and gives them a sense of what's in that email.  

In this case, you might use something like as simple in the heading as, did you get my poster? People instinctively respond to questions, and this is directly about the thing that you sent. So it's clear what's going to be inside the email. People don't like surprises, so if you're very clear about what they're getting, they're more likely to open it.  

If you send the catalog a trifold, a package, anything of that sort to a curator dealer. This is a headline that will get people or a subject line rather, that will get people to click on it. This of course depends on your audience. This might not be formal enough for a more conservative audience, whereas it would match really well to a small, independent gallery owner, so you're gonna have to modulate your tone accordingly.  

Then what you wanna do is send a very short email that simply says something to the effect of, hi, I know this is a busy time for all of us right now, so I'm gonna follow up in detail more in the new year. Let me know if you got the poster, then sign it with your name. So this email does a couple of things.  

Number one, it builds your reputation. It's not just that they're too busy, you're saying you are too. Right? And that's probably true because it's a very busy time of year. Number two, it demonstrates your responsible nature. You're a good communicator. You're doing this outreach. It tells them that you might be good to work with.  

Number three, it asks them to respond. Here, it's a very low stakes ask, so it's very easy for them to shoot off an email, and this is just one scenario. In Monday's webinar, I'm gonna walk through the exact formula for different situations, whether you're following up after meeting someone at an opening, reaching out cold with a strong connection point, or trying to reengage somebody who you talked to months ago, each one needs a slightly different approach, and I'll show you exactly how to structure them.  

Which brings me to the biggest reason that artists emails don't get a response. And this applies to whether you're using the poster strategy or any other approach. At base, a lack of response isn't disinterest, although that may be the end result.  

It's that the email didn't make it easy for somebody to respond. In order to make it easy for someone to respond, you need to do the following. So this is another list here first. Do the research to establish a concrete reason for connecting, and that's not, Hey, you're a gallery. I'm an artist. Let's do a show together.  

It's really about looking at their programming, understanding what they offer, and establishing a connection If the recipient doesn't have anything to say. And that is usually because of lack of fit. Then the email won't get a response. It's far easier to say nothing than to send an awkward email explaining that you're not interested.  

So most curators and dealers just don't do that, and that totally makes sense. Now the second thing you need to do is explain the purpose of the email in the first sentence. If you explain why you're emailing at the end of the email, and in my experience, this is what the vast majority of artists do.  

Nine times out of 10, they've already stopped reading. They need to know why they should read, and if that's explained at the beginning of the email, they can determine their interest immediately, and they're gonna do that anyway in the first couple of sentences. So you might as well say that from the beginning.  

And that's as simple as saying, hi, I'm emailing because blah, blah, blah. Now the next principle to keep in mind is just as simplify. You may have five questions you want to ask. Do not ask those five questions. I mean, think about it. If you send somebody a three paragraph email and include five different questions, their first thought is going to be okay.  

This is gonna take some time and thought to respond. Do you respond to that email? Right away. No, you put it off, right? I mean, okay. I, I don't wanna speak for you, but that is what I do for sure. And that is why I make sure to ask people just one question and phrase it in such a way that they can answer in one or two sentences.  

And again, we strategize a lot of this inside the membership, but that's the basic gist of it. Finally, number four, the last line should always be a call to action. You're gonna ask them what they think, you know, whether they have times to meet you. Whatever the purpose of the email is, the question is gonna respond to that.  

And if you are asking a scheduling question, give them times that you're available so that they have fewer decisions to make people get decision fatigue. So the, the less you can ask of them, the better. The whole goal here is to make it easy for people to say yes to a studio visit. And then make it harder for them to back out because people cancel all the time.  

And that is why I find calendar invites and fastidious artists who follow up before the visit. That is why they tend to have fewer cancellations. Everybody has them. You can't get rid of them. But that is something that you can do to mitigate that. Now if you are thinking, okay, but what specific words do I use?  

How do I phrase the follow up so I don't sound desperate? Like that sort of thing. That is exactly what we will be covering in the webinar on Monday. I'll give you real examples that you can adapt and you'll have a chance to ask questions. One of the things that you'll notice here is that while the goal is always to make their decisions easy, you also want to increase the commitment level as you go.  

So while you might begin with something as simple as, did you get my package? In an ideal world that's leading to emails that say. Do you have a contract I can sign? And the best way to do this is to make sure that you are aware of the steps that need to be taken. Studio visits are great, but just like the email, you wanna be clear on what your ideal outcome is.  

And for the first time studio visits that really usually should not be representation or an acquisition, but rather establishing whether there's a shared set of values. Now, every visit is different. There are exceptions, but that is something that I like to just remind everyone here to do, just to lower the expectations a little bit, because that's gonna calm your nerves too.  

Every email should move you closer to that studio visit. If you want the exact framework for making that happen, the timing, the follow up strategy, join me Monday night. I'll walk through real email exchanges and we'll workshop some scenarios together. I'll be laying out the exact steps that you need to take to get the information you need from professionals so you're not wasting anyone's time and you know exactly what to do because in most cases.  

The issue I see with artists isn't that they are unaware of their art audience. It's that they don't know what to ask and when to ask it, and these are very solvable problems. Okay, links in the show notes. I will see you on Monday. Thank you for listening. If you like the show, please leave a review and share it with a friend.  

It really helps get that valuable information out to more artists just like you. You can find all of the names and the links that we reference in this conversation at berksshop.art slash podcast.  

Paddy