@jordanboon0 – certainly there is more than one way to accomplish what you are proposing here.
My first thought upon reading this is is that you can create a “multi-user blog” with wordpress. Each new artist becomes a “contributor” or even “editor” upon sign up, and they can post a new gallery easily, then your admin(s) can choose what new galleries get published.
You go do all that with a single blog / wordpress install – and do it without buddypress, just make a cool custom author page for whichever theme you want to use.
There are many plugins and settings for things like front end uploads, post author profiles, wordpress gallery fancy stuff and all that.
You could also put buddypress into this mix and give your artists some extra social network stuff like private messages, groups and all that – however if you go with buddypress and and that layer to handle everything (without getting your users to submit posts / pages via standard wordpress) – then you have to get into a media plugin like rtmedia, mediapress, or – another one posted about a month ago.. anyhow – those media plugins are kind of their own “silos” – customizing how they work is not a few wp repo plugins away – and support for what you may want to do with them may be disappointing.
Of course you could take WP, add in BP if you really want the social layer, and still use the main site blog as kind of a “multi-user (or “group” blog) and do it that way.. you could get more complex and turn it into a multi-site install where each user get’s their own unique blog with gallery plugins – but moderation of posts and such with that setup may become more of a challenge – along with the extra headaches with running a multi blog network.
Anyhow – given the details you provided with your stated goals, I would forget about buddypress and multi-site – just install wordpress and do some searches in the wp-repo and themes section for “author pages”, “group blog” “post moderation” “front end uploads” and the various “Gallery” plugins – I think you can accomplish what you are going for pretty easily with lots of customization options.. without all the drawbacks and limitations of BP.
