What’s this gallery thing?

I'm opening a new fine art exhibition on Friday at Western Gallery. It seems like a good moment to explain what this gallery thing is.

You may know that I run a boutique online art gallery called Western Gallery. Or you might not. I get a version of "What's this gallery thing?" fairly frequently from old friends. The story is that I started it almost by accident in 2017, turned it into a real company in 2020, built it into my full-time career for a few years, and now run it alongside everything else I do. These days it lives entirely online, and an exciting new show opens on Friday featuring an artist I've been watching since she was painting scenes from a video game.

Scratching the Creative Itch

In October 2017, my wife and I had just moved from Nashville back to suburban Dallas, Texas. I'd spent a few years writing songs for country radio, but with a new full-time job and a wild two-year-old boy, regular songwriting wasn't a good fit for me anymore. I grew up in an artistic family, with both parents painters, and earned my own BFA from UT Austin, so for a new creative outlet it came naturally to pick up a brush and try to paint Western landscapes.

To find my voice, I started searching through old paintings of the American West, and posting what I liked on Instagram as @westerngallery. The idea was I'd post my inspiration, learn from it, develop a body of my own work, and ideally have an interested audience already in place to sell to.

But that’s not at all what happened. An audience grew before I developed as an artist. People quickly started finding and commenting on the paintings I was posting, and a lot of the commenters turned out to be contemporary artists themselves. The IG account turned into more of a curatorial project, which led me to start a podcast (Horizons, in which I interviewed artists across the West), and then, in January 2020, I incorporated as a real business with the intention of selling others’ paintings.

Opening a gallery at the best worst time

Western Gallery's first show, New Western Talent, opened in May 2020. The timing was incredible (and terrible): COVID-19 had just shut everything down. Galleries were closed, artists had nowhere to sell, collectors had nowhere to look, but I was entirely online from day one. The thing I'd been worrying might be a hard sell was suddenly the only option anyone had.

The first few years were a wild ride. Group shows, then solo shows, then representing artists, then pop-ups, then an ongoing physical space in Austin. I went from running a curatorial Instagram account to running a gallery with inventory, programming, and overrun in-person openings. But by then, the world had reopened, every gallery had upped their online game, and half of what had set Western Gallery apart in 2020 (selling art directly online) wasn't that special anymore. I'd also gotten really pulled into the IRL side, where events and the physical space kept demanding more time and attention, so my online sales, which had been the engine the whole time, quietly dried up. By the end of 2023 I had to close the space. I was pretty bummed and pretty broke.

So I went back to work as a digital creative director and joined Glide, a truly awesome web agency. But that's its own essay to come. I almost shut Western Gallery down at that point, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. And, with steady income, I was able to keep it alive without needing it to support my family, so I continued to present artists (though less frequently and even more deliberately), and started rebuilding the back end of the operation. Finally, last fall, I began WG 2.0 in earnest with a solo show on a new platform (Shopify instead of WooCommerce) for Leslie De Leon. It was a much quieter opening than New Western Talent, but a successful re-debut, nonetheless.

It's all about the people, man

Over time, I've come to realize that one of the things I value most about Western Gallery is watching the emerging artists I present move onwards into real art careers, showing in highly respected and reputable galleries across the country, and winning awards at notable museum and national shows. Another part is connecting collectors with a work and artist that they absolutely love. Maybe it should have been obvious to me from the start, but I’ve realized that the relationships and the gratification I find in helping others are the soul of this project.

Which brings me to Friday. This week I’m opening Neon West, a solo show of ten new paintings by Ally Morgan. I met Ally on Instagram years ago when she was painting fan art of Red Dead Redemption, and she was the only Red Dead fan artist whose work was, frankly, worth a shit. So I messaged her, we started talking, eventually she joined an artist development community I was running, and over the next several years she found a truly distinct and authentic voice that sits as comfortably in the Western genre as in the wider contemporary art world. 

What an online art gallery does for me

I’ve come to understand that Western Gallery isn't just a business to me, but it's a vehicle that lets me synthesize all the things I'm good at and many of the things I care about in one place. My design education runs through the branding, the show concepts and how the materials are presented. The web and marketing background help me build, tweak and maintain the site and the sales processes. My love for the West and for authentic, meaningful and interesting artistic expression runs through the curation. Some of what I learned in Nashville helps me package and present the artists in a way that the public can easily digest. And the community I accidentally built on Instagram in 2017 has grown and become a platform of sorts that serves collectors and artists and facilitates more connection with old friends while making new ones.

It would be a (much 😅) simpler story if Western Gallery had just shot up and to the right, but the version I have is something I’m really proud of, regardless. It's a lot of work, and it's not very glamorous at all, but it's all worth it when a great show comes together.

I hope you'll come check out Ally Morgan's debut solo exhibition, Neon West, at www.western.gallery on Friday.