By the time RISD asked me to curate their MFA Painting thesis show, I already knew the cohort — we’d spent the fall together in crit, and we had developed a genuine rapport. I was happy to help. Our conversations about their individual works, as well as our times in group critique, showed me that this group was surprisingly well adjusted, thoughtful, and caring to one another. This is not always the case. It was almost a bit odd. I’ve reminded them of this more than once, to signal that it’s not entirely the norm, nor what they might find waiting for them outside of school.
As part of my contract, I was supposed to find a venue for the show to take place, which was new to me. I assumed an institution would sort that out, but since I had a long standing relationship with Rachel Uffner, I reached out to her to get her thoughts. She was receptive but had to pass it by the new gallery partner, Lucy Liu (not the actress). They agreed, we made terms, deadlines, and kept moving along. It was several weeks in, when the students were completing work and sending final images that they began to anxiously reach out to talk about one last thing they hadn’t settled - pricing.
I spoke with a number of them, offering my best advice for their particular bodies of work, and based on their history of pricing, but I also wondered if hearing this from a gallery might actually be more interesting and relevant for them. So I reached out to Lucy and asked if she might jump on a call with the group and offer a short seminar on pricing. She graciously agreed and as we all jumped on a zoom call together, what struck me, an hour in, was how open and transparent she was. Gallerists get cast, fairly and unfairly, as the ones holding the cards close. Lucy just kept turning hers face up.
She opened with a formula: height plus width, times a factor that the gallery sets based on the state of the market. She agreed, unprompted, that it probably should be area-based — but that’s not the system, and, according to her, nobody seems to know why. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t familiar with this formula or how many galleries use it, but I do think it’s worth noting that very often there is a loose formula, particularly for paintings (Lucy agreed - the formula is largely for painting.). The factor moves over time, and it’s the gallery’s call, because the gallery is the one reading the market — but she was clear that the increase is never handed down. It’s always a dialogue. Knowing that you have agency in the course of your career is important, even when you feel out of your depth.
Then came the actual numbers. A first show out of an MFA - a show that would normally be hosted in their upstairs space - she said, is usually under $10,000 unless the work is genuinely monumental. She pulled up two recent examples — an artist fresh out of an MFA whose small works ran $1000 to $6,000, and another whose first New York show started around $4,000 and topped out near $12,000 for the larger pieces. I was pleasantly surprised that Lucy offered concrete examples regarding first show prices. These students were about to do the same thing, with far less information.
Prices can tell stories too, as Lucy explained. It is almost always better to sell out a show at a lower price than to sell two percent of a show at a higher one. Not because the number is inconsequential, but for the story of the sold-out show, and the story is what truly moves a market over years, not a single high price sitting unsold on a wall.
She was just as direct about the discomforts. Asked how young artists should handle a collector pushing for a steeper discount, she didn’t perform the confident non-answer sometimes given in public settings. She said it depends on the intention behind the ask, that you have to trust your own read of a person, and that if there’s any chance the interest is speculative rather than sincere — buying to flip rather than to grow with — it’s fair, and wise, to be careful. She talked about international pricing the same way, admitting that there’s no clean formula, that consistency matters but so does some flexibility, and that most gallerists genuinely want to be asked directly rather than everyone traveling on assumptions.
Someone then asked how, as an artist with no gallery relationship yet, you’re supposed to get a gallerist’s attention without seeming desperate or transactional. Lucy said there’s no perfect script — that if you’re paying attention to another person at all, you can usually tell whether interest is real or being extended out of politeness, and that chasing the latter is a waste of everyone’s time. I added, because it felt true and because I’ve lived on both sides of this exact interaction more times than I can count, that the only version of it that has ever worked for me is a boring one: find people and artworks you’re actually moved by, say so specifically, and let the conversation go wherever it goes from there. A real reaction, offered without an angle attached to it usually grounds a conversation in mutual interest and care. And if it doesn’t, don’t take it personally, just move on.
Often, artists, particularly those with less career-experience, talk about galleries like they’re black boxes — opaque, unaccountable, operating by rules you’re not allowed to see. But galleries, Lucy insisted, even large ones, are tiny businesses run by a handful of individual people making individual decisions under real financial pressure. Ask who you’re actually talking to. Ask what the decision-making process is. You are, she said, entitled to that transparency, and the artists who ask for it plainly tend to fare better than the ones who quietly assume they’re not allowed to.
That’s worth sitting with, because it undoes the myth that many students carry with them — that pricing, and the art market more broadly, is a closed system that you succumb to rather than participate within imperfectly. It’s always a conversation between people, many of whom I think, are trying to get it right even when they don’t always manage to.