What to Put on Your Artist Website Before Gallery Outreach

An artist website doesn’t need to be elaborate before you send it to a gallery. It needs to be clear. The person opening it should be able to see the work properly, find the basic details, and know how to contact you without going on a small administrative hike.

Before gallery outreach, run your site through a short list: honest, well-lit images of current work in a clear order, complete artwork details, a plain statement and bio, an up-to-date CV, and contact information that actually works. That’s the core. In practice, this is what decides whether a director keeps looking: your website isn’t there to be a monument, it’s there to answer the quiet question underneath the click, can they understand your work quickly enough to keep paying attention.

Start with one clear, ordered view of the work

A gallery director opening your site for the first time should reach the artwork in one click, and the artwork they see first should be the work you actually want them judging you on. Homepage to work, work to a single piece. No detour through a mood board or a process page before anyone has seen an image.

Order matters as much as access. Lead with your strongest, most current work, not your oldest or most numerous. A tight, recent body of work says more about where you are now than a full archive ever will. If you work across distinct series, keep them separate rather than blending everything into one long scroll a visitor has to sort out themselves.

Older work still has a place. Archive it on purpose, in its own section, so the first impression points toward what you want remembered right now.

A simple structure carries most artists through gallery outreach without trouble: homepage, work, about, CV, contact. Add a page when the work genuinely needs it. Don’t add one because a website felt like it should have more pages. That instinct rarely serves the person actually opening the site.

Show the work the way documentation shows it, honestly

Bad documentation is the single most common reason a promising artist site fails in the first thirty seconds. Glare across a varnished surface, a tilted wall, mismatched color between shots, a piece photographed at an angle that shrinks it, any one of these makes a director stop scrolling before they’ve actually looked at the work.

The standard to hit: even lighting, a camera held square to the piece, and color that reads true. For flat work, one clean straight-on image per piece is the baseline. For sculpture or anything three-dimensional, a single front view flattens the object into a rumor, so add a side or three-quarter angle and a detail shot when the surface or construction matters.

If you’re photographing this yourself for now, natural indirect light and a level camera get you most of the way there. When the work is ready for catalog, sale, or reproduction use, that’s the point where professional art documentation earns its cost. Our own pricing runs from a single color-corrected hero shot at $50 a piece up to a hero plus two detail shots and a short video clip at $150, because most galleries want more than one angle before they trust what they’re seeing.

Every piece needs title, year, medium, dimensions, and status

Every artwork page or caption needs the information a gallery already expects: title, year, medium, dimensions, and availability. That’s the floor. If dimensions are missing, add them before you send anything out, because a small painting and a six-foot canvas read as identical rectangles on a screen otherwise.

Medium tells a viewer how the work actually exists once it’s off the wall. Dimensions tell them whether it fits the space they’re picturing. Both are quick to add and easy to forget once a piece has been sitting on the site for a while.

Pricing is optional and depends entirely on how you handle sales. Some artists list a price or mark a piece available, sold, or in a private collection. Others keep pricing off the site and handle it by inquiry. Either works, as long as the page doesn’t make the piece feel abandoned or impossible to ask about.

If the work is editioned, say so. If a framed piece’s listed dimensions include the frame, say that too. The goal isn’t a shipping manifest, it’s enough information that a director doesn’t have to email you just to ask what should already be on the page.

Statement, bio, and CV: what each one actually needs

These three do different jobs, and mixing them up is where most sites lose clarity. A quick way to check yours:

• Statement. A few grounded paragraphs on what you’re working with and what you’re paying attention to. It should give a viewer a handle on the work, not replace looking at it.
• Bio. Who you are, where you’re based, and what kind of work you make, plus real markers of practice if you have them: education, exhibitions, residencies, publications, collections. Early-career isn’t a failure state. A clear, honest bio beats a stretched one.
• CV. Organized by exhibitions, education, residencies, awards, press, and collections, in reverse chronological order. A downloadable PDF is useful, but keep a scannable web version too, since a director opening many links in a row won’t stop to download one.

Whichever of the three needs work, write plainly first. If a sentence needs three reads to find its subject, cut it. Keep all three current. A statement describing a body of work you finished two years ago, or a bio pointing to a show that already happened, quietly tells the reader the site isn’t a reliable source for anything else either.

What actually makes a director close the tab

Nobody announces this out loud, but a few things reliably end the visit before it starts. A broken image where the hero piece should be. A homepage that makes someone hunt for the actual work through a menu of unrelated pages. Captions with no dimensions, no medium, no year, so every piece reads as an unlabeled JPEG. A contact page with no visible email, just a form that may or may not actually send.

None of these are dramatic failures. They’re small, and that’s exactly why they’re common. A site can look polished and still fail on this list, because polish and documentation quality aren’t the same thing. A quiet, plainly built site with sharp images and complete details will outperform a beautifully designed one hiding a blurry hero shot and a caption that just says “mixed media.”

Before you send a link to a gallery, walk it the way a stranger would. Click the homepage, open one artwork page, check that the image loads and the details are there, then find the contact link without scrolling twice. If any step snags, that’s what to fix first, not the design.

Make contact easy to find and easy to use

Put contact information somewhere obvious: a dedicated page, or at minimum a visible email in the footer. A form can work as a secondary option, but it shouldn’t be the only way to reach you if it reads as a gate rather than a door.

For gallery outreach specifically, include your name, email, city, and whatever professional links you actually use. Instagram is useful as a supplement, not a replacement. It’s a rented room with someone else’s rules on it. Your website is the one place that’s actually yours.

If you’re open to commissions, studio visits, press, or exhibition inquiries, say so plainly on the page. Nobody needs a paragraph justifying whatever you’d rather keep private.

Do one slow pass before you send the link anywhere. Click the homepage, open the work page, load one artwork, check the About page, check the CV, and send yourself the contact form if you use one. This isn’t glamorous, but it’s what catches a dead email address, a broken PDF, or a page that loads strangely on a phone, the small things that quietly tell a director whether the site is actually being kept up.