Anyone can meet the bar to join: a documented, publicly shared connection to the mission and a body of work. That bar says nothing about whether the work sells — and in any major metro there were already more eligible artists than the roster could ever hold. So the eligible pool was never the constraint; finding the right artists inside it was. The business ran on a saleable collection, and far more work doesn't fit the corporate market than does — true of any body of work, mine included. My read ran three ways at once — what we had, what was being produced, and what we could produce — and I recruited toward the fit the collection was missing: the specific artists it needed, since a few well-matched do more than a longer roster. Every artist we took on was a promise of real opportunity, so a roster we couldn't sell for would have failed the artists as surely as the business.