Farley Gwazda has worked as an art estate manager, gallery director, curator, studio assistant, art lecturer, and artist. He draws on his broad experience to advise artists and creative workers who are looking to preserve and promote their life’s work.
As a practicing artist, Gwazda understands creative work and the challenges that artists face in managing their accumulated art objects and records. Working with artists to explore various legacy planning options and make key decisions, he enables them to provide for the care of their collection and to preserve their intangible cultural legacy for future generations. Ultimately, he aims to free up artists’ time and bandwidth so they can spend more time doing what they love, confident that their practice is professionally managed, and that they have a plan for their future.
Farley Gwazda with Sonya Rapoport’s Shoe-Field (scroll), 1982.
Experience:
2015 - present
Director of the Sonya Rapoport Legacy Trust, which endeavors to preserve the artwork and promote the legacy of the painter and conceptual, feminist, and new-media artist Sonya Rapoport (1923 - 2015). For several years Gwazda worked as Rapoport’s studio assistant, processing her extensive archives (now at the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley). Following her death, he went on to work with the family to manage her art estate, including inventorying and preserving her work, and creating a website that documents her multifaceted career. He has worked with curators to arrange exhibitions of her work at San José Museum of Art, Casemore Kirkeby Gallery, Krowswork, Berkeley Art Museum, Kala Art Institute, and SFMOMA, and has collaborated with art agents and historians Terri Cohn and Alla Efimova to produce catalogs and critical texts that contextualize her work.
2014 - 2021
Director of the Worth Ryder Art Gallery at the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice, where he was responsible for all aspects of a busy program of exhibitions, including retrospectives of artists Katherine Sherwood, Robert Hartman, and John McNamara. He put together over 70 exhibitions, arranged lectures and public programs, taught a popular internship course that exposed students to professional practices, and was awarded a grant to establish a DIY contemporary art library in the gallery.
2008 - 2014
Co-Founder and Co-Director with Indira Martina Morre of Martina }{ Johnston, an artist-run house gallery in Berkeley. Funded by an Alternative Exposure grant from Southern Exposure, they curated over 20 exhibitions with the goals of creating a community space and eliciting a critical response from art writers. Featured artists include Anne Walsh, Alex Nowik, Azin Seraj, Veronica DeJesus, Ali Dadgar, and Jaime Cortez, among others.
Gwazda’s art practice informs his work as a consultant, and his work is influenced by his experience playing multiple roles in the art world. He has created interactive drawing, video, and new media installations and has shown his work at Krowswork, Royal NoneSuch Gallery, Aggregate Space, Interface Gallery, Peephole Cinema, New Nothing Cinema, and The Richmond Art Center in the Bay Area, as well as Flux Factory (Queens, NY), The Croatian Association of Artists (Zagreb), Design Festa (Tokyo), and Red Gate Gallery (Beijing), among others.
Farley Gwazda received his BA in Studio Art from Bard College, NY, in 2001, and his MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley in 2009.
He lives and works in Berkeley, CA.