How artist-run NYC gallery markets itself without social media

Most galleries treat an Instagram account as a cost of doing business. cia gallery, a ground-floor storefront that opened last winter in Ridgewood, Queens, has run nearly a year of programming without one.

"Having social media helps your clients see you while they're working with you," said Julia Sinelnikova, the artist who founded the space in December. "Does it help you get new clients? Almost no."

Sinelnikova said the gallery has no social media accounts at all, but it has had steady visitors across its 10 shows. She said she does not know of another New York gallery operating without social media.

She does, however, still use her own personal Instagram account, including to market the gallery's latest show.

"I've done social media since I was like 13, 12 maybe?" Sinelnikova said when asked whether she was nervous about marketing the gallery's shows without social media. "I'm 36, so I know that I want something that people find out about, and they've been doing that."

The gallery's bare-bones website has the aesthetic of something HTML-coded by hand in the MySpace era.

The artist, who curates most of the shows herself, said the space is deliberately analog.

It is currently showing work by Mexican printmaker Iza Mendoza, who couldn't attend the opening after the U.S. government denied her visa.

The gallery has shown no screen-based work, only a few projections she described as analog in origin. There is no rule against digital tools, just a preference to keep them out.

Her reasons start with a Meta rollout this summer. On July 7, Meta launched a feature tied to its Muse Image generator that let people create A.I. images from strangers’ public Instagram photos by tagging the accounts. Users were opted in by default. Meta pulled it three days later after a wave of backlash over consent.

“Every single photo you and I have ever posted, and all of our friends, was eligible” to be fed into the tool, Sinelnikova said of the days before it came down.

That, plus the copyrights users sign away and the profiles built from their activity, hardened a view she had been forming for years. “You can’t turn off,” she said. “If you turn a setting off, you log back in, and new settings will have been turned on for you.”

She said burnout is now its own subject online. “Everyone’s suffering from burnout to the point where half the stuff you see on social media is people talking about burnout,” Sinelnikova said. “So it’s really eating itself.”

Sinelnikova said she can draw attention to her shows the old-school way, through pitching stories to the press. She said she makes sure her pitches are tailored to the journalists she reaches out to and relevant to stories they have previously covered.

For this story, Sinelnikova reached out to Urgent Matter herself — without a public relations agency.

She said cia has landed coverage for every show, which she measures against the field. “Almost every gallery gets one article a year,” she said.

She said writers from Hyperallergic, The New York Times and Artforum have come through the space or written back, and that the gallery has appeared in print. But she blasted certain press in the art magazine world, which she did not name, for asking $3,000 for an article.

“I don’t pay for press, and I won’t for this gallery,” she said.

Sinelnikova is deliberate about who she works with. She said the gallery has worked with almost entirely female and artist-of-color curators and artists, and that she intends to keep it that way.

“That hasn’t been the norm at almost any spaces that I’ve worked with or dealt with,” she said. She argued that solo shows by women, especially, remain hard to mount. “It’s so hard to even have a show of a female artist.”

Sinelnikova has been organizing shows for more than 20 years, since she was a teenager. She was born in Russia, left through Israel, and grew up in Austin, Texas, before starting in art through poetry readings in Houston.

In New York, she said she assisted at galleries, worked at the Brooklyn Museum and at Christie’s, helped organize Bushwick Open Studios for five years from around 2009 to 2014, and makes public sculpture, including pieces for NYC Parks.

She chose Ridgewood for its rents and density of working artists. After living there, she noticed “almost everyone was carrying a portfolio or an instrument." And she pointed to nearby music and performance venues as the neighborhood’s cultural base, with galleries arriving after.

"There's nowhere to show art," Sinelnikova said. "Have you noticed everything's closed? ... All the galleries that you can get into as a person who doesn't have 20 to 30 years behind you barely can stay open."

Sinelnikova's misgivings about the art industry extend past social media to the art itself.

"I definitely think that there's a dumbing down of art, and everyone I know has noticed it," Sinelnikova said.

She blamed the money behind large art projects rather than any one politics. "The people who back financially bigger art projects, they don't want to take any risks," she said, and said the low-quality results turn up on museum walls.

Affordability made the Ridgewood space possible, but Sinelnikova said the lease wasn't easy to get.

“I wouldn’t have been able to open this space if I wasn’t able to make a low rent deal, which was hard for me as a female artist,” she said, adding she had to put down extra deposits. The landlord required her to carry liability insurance, the first time she has insured a space.

Sinelnikova said the news coverage that does come has sometimes chased the wrong story. The magazines that asked her to pay to be covered as a gallerist have already written at length about a lawsuit she brought against the Museum of Sex, a matter unrelated to her gallery.

“It’s a crazy double standard,” Sinelnikova said. “You don’t write about actual artists doing stuff, but you’ll write about the lawsuit, which is just kind of humiliating.”

Sinelnikova sued the Museum of Sex in February 2024 in the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, claiming the museum used her image in advertising without her consent. The case centers on a 2019 photograph taken at the museum showing her kissing her then-girlfriend, who was a museum employee.

In her lawsuit, Sinelnikova said she never signed a release or licensed the photo and that the museum ran it on subway ads, LED sidewalk displays, ticketing platforms, its website and social media.

Her lawsuit quotes a January 2024 email from museum director Dan Gluck acknowledging that the photo ran without a release: “I am dumbfounded no one got your permission at the time,” he wrote.

The case was certified ready for trial in April 2025, and a settlement conference was set for May 21. The museum’s lawyer, Robert J. Basil, asked to adjourn that conference, saying he would be on trial in federal court in New Jersey.

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