It now seems very unlikely that our After the Coal Dust exhibition at the HIP Gallery, Hull will take place at all.
We have been unable to get a reply or acknowledgement from them despite attempting to contact them several times. Their 2019 programme is full apparently and if we can’t even get a response from them there doesn’t seem to be any prospect of the exhibition going ahead in 2020 either.
Disappointing in some ways but I don’t see how we can take this forward as over the past month or so we have emailed the curator three times, FB messaged twice, emailed the gallery itself all without any reply. A phone call promising a call back never materialised either.
This lack of communication has been in complete contrast to the other galleries we have dealt with and under these circumstances, we don’t now feel we would be able to work with them.
Apologies to all those who had hoped to see us in Hull but there’ll be other places 🙂
John & Bridget.
So they said no?
No, that was the problem – they stopped saying anything, ignoring our emails completely.
We contacted them initially in 2018 and they said they were interested. We explained the situation regarding prints and frames (we were happy to supply them in this case although some venues covered the printing and framing costs themselves). A follow-up email from them suggested 2019 which was fine by us, we’d no problem whatsoever regarding dates.
At the beginning of March this year we emailed the CEO/curator to see when they were looking to run the exhibition – no answer.
Towards the end of March, we tried again – no reply.
In April we emailed yet again to both the curator and the general email for the gallery – again no reply.
Phoned up and was told our message would be passed on to the curator – nothing happened.
Tried a Facebook message – no response.
At this point, we felt that ignoring us completely meant that they’d changed their minds. Although whether they had or hadn’t just ignoring us was out of order.
In fact, the only thing we’ve heard from them was a reply saying we were out of order for posting on Facebook a week ago criticising them for not keeping us informed. A subsequent FB message from us has so far again been ignored.
To summarise our issue has been the lack of communication and the fact that they simply ignored six attempts to contact them. The majority of galleries say no to exhibition proposals – that’s inevitable. The HIP Gallery said yes and then went quiet. We wouldn’t have minded as much if they said ‘sorry we’ve changed our minds’ or ‘it’s still on but will be in 2020 or whenever’. It came across to us as bad-mannered to blank us. It takes a couple of minutes to answer an email or give us a call – that’s all it would have taken.
We’ve had a few exhibitions now and a few rejections but this has been the only place that has acted like this.