- Your subject line determines whether journalists open the email at all
- Lead with the most newsworthy fact, not institutional pleasantries
- Include a practical info block with press contact, images, and dates
Once the release is approved, place it inside a complete media package with the free Gallery Press Kit Checklist.
In 2018, while editing ART UKRAINE, I received roughly 30 press releases a week from galleries across Kyiv and beyond, and I read every one of them. Most took me less than ten seconds to discard, not because the exhibitions were bad, but because the releases gave me no reason at all to keep reading past the first line.
The subject line would say something like "New Exhibition at Gallery X." The first paragraph would announce that the gallery was "pleased to present" a show, while the second listed the artist's degrees and previous exhibitions in a tidy row. Somewhere in the third paragraph, buried under institutional language, there might finally be a sentence about what the work actually looked like or why anyone should care. By then I had already moved on to the next email in the stack.
I have spent years on the receiving end of these emails, and just as many years writing releases myself. So I can tell you exactly where most galleries lose the journalist's attention, and, more usefully, how you keep it from the first word to the last.
The Subject Line Decides Everything
A journalist's inbox holds dozens of press releases on any given day, and your subject line competes against every one of them for a few seconds of attention. A line like "New Exhibition Opening at Gallery X" communicates nothing, and "Exhibition of Paintings" somehow manages to communicate even less.
What the subject line actually needs is one specific, interesting fact. Think "Painter's first show in 12 years opens in Barcelona," or "Gallery presents 30 works recovered from a Kyiv basement during occupation," or "Solo exhibition explores the 400-year history of a single pigment." Each of these creates a question the reader wants answered, and that question is exactly what gets your email opened.
If you cannot write an interesting subject line, the real issue is usually that you do not yet understand what makes your own exhibition interesting. That is a curatorial problem, not a writing one.
The First Paragraph Is the Whole Story
Journalists trained in news writing call this the inverted pyramid, where the most important information comes first and everything after it serves as supporting detail. Art press releases tend to do the exact opposite. They build up slowly, save the interesting parts for the end, and assume the reader will stay for the whole journey. The reader will not stay.
Your first paragraph needs to answer what this exhibition is, who the artist is, and where and when it happens. Most importantly, it needs to answer what makes the show worth covering rather than simply worth seeing, because those two things are not the same. A beautiful show with no angle is genuinely hard to write about. A show with a story, a controversy, a first, a return, or a connection to something happening in the world right now is exactly what gets press.
What Press Releases Get Wrong About Artist Bios
The standard approach is to list every exhibition, degree, and residency the artist has ever had, which quietly turns the middle section of your press release into a CV. Journalists do not need a CV from you. They need context they can use.
Instead of listing credentials, pick the two or three facts about the artist that are genuinely most relevant to this exhibition. If the show is about displacement, mention that the artist left their studio during the war. If it uses an unusual material, explain how the artist came to work with it in the first place. Everything else belongs in the appendix rather than the body.
When I profiled Voloshyn Gallery for YellowBlue, the story was never about their exhibition history. It was about two gallerists who opened a show in Miami on February 5, 2022, planned to fly home to Kyiv, and then 17 days later watched Russia invade their country. That single detail told the reader everything about who they were and why their work mattered. Your press release needs exactly that kind of detail.
The Practical Section Nobody Includes
At the bottom of every press release, after the essay portion has done its job, there should be a block of practical information formatted so a journalist can copy it straight into their piece without hunting for anything.
Exhibition title (in the original language and in English if different). Artist name(s) with dates and nationality. Venue with full address. Dates including opening reception. Hours. Admission (free or ticketed). Press contact with name, email, and phone. High-resolution images available for download, with proper attribution information for each.
This all sounds obvious, and yet you would be surprised how many releases arrive without a press contact, without image credits, or with dates so ambiguous that a journalist in another time zone cannot tell when the show actually opens. Every missing detail is one more reason for that journalist to cover someone else's show instead of yours. If you want a full checklist to work from, I wrote a separate guide on what to include in a gallery press kit.
The Difference Between Description and Argument
The weakest press releases simply describe what the exhibition contains. A line like "The show features 25 paintings in oil and acrylic, exploring themes of memory and identity" tells me what is in the room but says nothing about why any of it matters.
The strongest press releases make an argument instead. Something closer to "Over three years, the artist painted the same view from her studio window 300 times, documenting not the view but the way her own perception of it changed after her diagnosis." That is no longer a description. It is a reason to pay attention.
When I reviewed exhibitions for ART UKRAINE, the shows I wrote about at length were never the ones with the best descriptions. They were the ones where somebody, whether the curator or the artist or the press writer, had figured out why this show existed right now and told me so within the first three sentences.
Format and Length
Keep it to one page, two at the absolute most, because a press release is not a catalog essay, it is an invitation to look closer rather than a substitute for the looking itself.
Use short paragraphs, leave plenty of white space, and bold the exhibition title, the artist name, and the dates so they are easy to find at a glance. Attach two or three high-resolution images with captions and credits. Send the whole thing both as a PDF and in the body of the email, not only as an attachment, because some journalists will not open attachments from senders they do not recognize.
The galleries that get covered are not the ones with the most impressive exhibition histories. They are the ones that respect how little time a journalist has and write accordingly. If you have an exhibition coming up and want a press release that gets read, I can help, because after 100+ published articles and years as an editor deciding which shows to cover, I know what makes a journalist stop scrolling.