I’ve talked a little about exhibition installations but I thought I would share a little more about what my average day looks like as the gallery director at Pink Arrow Arts. 

The gallery is only open Friday and Saturday from 11am to 4pm but during those 5 hours windows I have to remain (mostly*) downstairs watching the doors for visitors. If any work needs to be done upstairs or out of the building it has to get done either before 11am or after 4pm. 

Today (being 4/24) was one of those days that I had a lot to do upstairs in our storage rooms and office. Today also happened to be a drop-off day for our next exhibition happening in May. 

7:00-8:00am

I got here much earlier than I usually do. On a “normal” day I’m here around 10 or 10:30am, maybe 9:30am if there’s an event. But I had to get here early to meet an artist who was dropping off artwork for our next exhibition in May. While I was waiting for them to come by I had some invoices to create. 

When artists sell their artwork or things in our gift shop we take a 30% commission. Artists then usually get paid at the end of their exhibition or the end of every month depending on if they sold something from our gift shop or an exhibition. I had gotten through most of the invoices last week but I had 2-3 to finish making this morning. 

8:00-9:00am

The artist got here around 8am and we brought all of their artwork inside. The initial drop off was pretty quick but I had to sort through a few boxes to start getting an idea of what I wanted to install on Sunday (4/26.) 

9:00am-12:00pm

Once I had a pretty good idea of what artwork was dropped off I had to store it upstairs until Sunday. The current exhibition isn’t getting taken down until Saturday (4/25) after 4pm and this exhibition is going up the very next day. 

The “problem” with storing the artwork was that our upstairs storage rooms and office were an absolute mess. They had been being used as either random storage rooms or still held a bunch of things from our Christmas show. Starting from around November of 2025 to today it had just been collecting more and more random pieces of artwork or pieces that needed to be returned or just random “things” that needed a permanent storage spot. 

I had been meaning to clear out the upstairs rooms for a while now but had never gotten here early enough to actually accomplish much if anything at all. And since I had to be here for 8am anyways I figured I might as well just kill my back lifting random artwork up and down for 3 hours straight. 

This took hours.

Much, much, longer than I had anticipated when I first started around 8:45. I thought I’d get done with everything around 10am. But once I started moving things around I would realize that I needed to clear other spots before moving anything. So clearing out 1 room turned to 2 rooms turned to 3 rooms. 

Below are pictures of the rooms before:

And after:

*above when I said I “mostly” don’t stay upstairs during our open hours, I didn’t mean today apparently haha. I spent the majority of today upstairs but left the doors open (we have two sets of doors so it wasn’t like doors open to the outside world animals coming inside open, just open enough that I could easily hear the glass door open if anyone came in either door.)

12:00pm-1:00pm

I had to stop for a bit around noon for a board meeting. We had to finalize the programs and exhibitions for the next 4 months. Nothing too exciting, but I’m glad we finally got things planned ahead more than 2 weeks in advance. 

1:00-1:15pm

Finally, something that didn’t take me an hour to do. I just ate lunch.

1:15-2:00pm

Back upstairs to finalize a few things. And I finally, finally set up a little station to cut labels out. Before this I had just been sitting on the floor with my mat board to cut out labels but sitting on the floor for hours hurts. 

This is probably the space I’m most excited about, I love cutting out labels. It’s so, so, so fun to just zone out for a while and make these things. I highly recommend the hobby of label making. 

2:00-4:00pm

Once I got the storage rooms and office all situated I had to send out some emails to people. I also got to update our website for the first time in a while with our upcoming exhibition. I’m very, very slowly going through our website and updating it to look more cohesive. 

And that was pretty much my entire day! Or all the “bigger” events, I also saw a cat outside and stared at it for a few minutes if anyone was wondering. 

If anyone wants to know any “specifics” of my day-to-day I’d be happy to write about it! A lot of my days are mostly the same so I never know what people want me to go more in depth on or have any burning questions about what it’s like working for an art gallery.

Cat:

Thanks for reading

~Ana