How to Host an Opening Night for an Online Exhibition

Most online shows die the same way. The work goes up, the link goes out on a Tuesday afternoon, twelve people tap it, and that’s the exhibition. Nothing was wrong with the art. There was simply no reason to turn up at any particular moment.

A physical opening solves it with a date, a door and everyone arriving at once. You can do the same online, and it takes an evening to plan.

Pick a time and tell people it exists

The fixed moment is the whole trick. “Come see my new work” is a chore someone will get to later. “Thursday 20:00, forty minutes, I’ll walk you through it” is an appointment.

Things that hold up in practice:

• Weekday evening, 19:00 to 21:00 local time. Late enough for work to be done, early enough that people are still awake.
• Keep it short. Thirty to forty-five minutes. A tight opening feels like an event; a two-hour one feels like a webinar.
• Say the timezone. If half your audience is abroad, write “20:00 Athens / 18:00 London” rather than making anyone do arithmetic.
• Announce an end date too. “On view until the 30th” gives the people who missed the opening their own deadline.

Build the invitation

An invitation is three lines and one image: who is showing, what the work is, when to arrive, and the link.

The image should be the space itself. Open your gallery in a desktop browser and press Reel: it records a cinematic walk through the rooms and hands you a vertical video ready for Stories or Reels. Post it with the date over it a week out, and again on the morning of. Nothing sells a walkable show like watching someone walk it.

Send the link with the invitation, not after. Let people wander in early. Curiosity before an opening is not a leak, it’s attendance.

Get the room right before you open the doors

Two days before, walk your own show the way a visitor will: drag to look, move through it, and do it once on your phone, because that is where most of your guests will be standing.

While you’re in there:

• Group the work into rooms from the Edit panel, so the walk has a shape. A room per series, per year or per theme gives you something to say at the door of each one.
• Check every title and description. An opening is the one night people read the labels.
• If your gallery is unlocked, run the AI curation pass when you’re stuck for words — it proposes titles, descriptions and room groupings, and nothing is written until you apply it. It comes with an unlocked gallery or the subscription; the pricing page has the current terms.
• Open the Book view once. Every public gallery also renders as a flip-through 3D catalogue, worth dropping in the chat for anyone who would rather read than walk.

The forty minutes

You are the guide.

Open the doors, then talk

Start a video call or a live stream and post the gallery link in the chat at the same time. Everyone opens the show on their own screen while you talk over it. Better than screen-sharing your own walk: each guest moves at their own pace and stops where they like.

If some guests would rather sit back, tell them to press Tour in the gallery. It plays a guided walk through the rooms on its own, and stops the moment they take control.

Walk it room by room

Ten to fifteen minutes. Go in the order the rooms are laid out, a minute or two each, and tell one concrete thing about every piece you stop at: what it’s made of, what went wrong, what it’s actually about. Nobody needs the artist statement read aloud. They came for the bits that aren’t written down.

Take questions

Fifteen minutes, and the part people remember. Ask one yourself if the chat is shy — “which room would you hang at home?” gets people naming specific works instead of being polite. If a piece is for sale, this is the moment to say so, and to mention that anyone can send an inquiry about it from the gallery.

Close properly

End with the end date, the link one more time, and a thank you. Do not let it fade out.

Afterwards, keep it working

An opening is a spike. The show is the month that follows it.

• Post the recording of the call, or a short clip of the walk-through, within a day.
• Post the Reel again, this time captioned “on view until the 30th”.
• Message the people who missed it individually with the link. A note addressed to one person gets opened; a second broadcast does not.
• Check who actually came. The Analytics tab in your settings shows visitor numbers for the gallery; the deeper breakdowns come with an unlocked gallery — see pricing.

For a collective or a class

The same evening scales. A collective can open several galleries on one night, each artist taking five minutes of the walk. A class works the same way: students join through one invite link by typing a nickname — no account, no email address for a school to approve. Each gets their own walkable show, and the class gets a public hub page listing them all, with the date the show is on view through. That page is what you send to parents. See Galerra for Education.

The checklist

Two weeks before Set the date and the end date. Upload the work and group it into rooms. Write the titles. Record the Reel.

One week before Send the invitation with the link. Post the Reel with the date. Walk the show on a phone and fix what looks wrong.

The day Post the reminder in the morning. Open the call ten minutes early. Have the link, the Book view and your notes in one place.

Afterwards Post the recording within 24 hours. Message the no-shows. Repost once a week until the end date.

Ready to put a date on it? Build your gallery, or walk a few public shows first to see how they feel from the visitor’s side.