William Baczek knows a thing or two about running an art gallery, though he didn’t start out with that expertise. Now, his gallery, William Baczek Fine Arts in Northampton, is celebrating three decades in business and the artist connections that made it possible. The gallery is honoring its 30th anniversary with an exhibition running through Saturday, June 6. Featuring 25 artists working across various styles and disciplines, the show highlights a mix of longtime gallery collaborators and newcomers.
“I want [visitors] to get a sense of history — that we’ve been at this a long time, and that we have art by artists who have been with us since day one,” Baczek said.
Baczek, who grew up in Palmer, studied clay sculpture and photography in college. When he graduated in 1980, he did “what most art school graduates do: I became a bartender,” he said. His alma mater didn’t teach art graduates the business skills they’d need for their career — writing a resume and applying for grants.
“Becoming a self-supporting or quote-unquote ‘successful’ artist was kind of this magical thing that was just supposed to happen, but it’s a job. And it’s like any other job. You’ve got to do certain things if you want to advance in your field,” he said.
Baczek went to Pierce’s Frameshop, the framing store in Northampton where he got his own photos framed, and he proposed a deal: if he could frame his photos there for free, he’d work for them part-time for free. Guild Art Supply owner Bill Muller later acquired the store before moving his business to Easthampton, and he asked Baczek to direct its Hart Gallery.
When Baczek began his gallery career, “I had to learn the business side of it. I knew nothing about selling art,” he said. “But I do like to talk.” Running a gallery requires a certain level of familiarity with his clients’ personal lives: “I know what color living room my clients have. I know their dogs’ names. I know when they change jobs. I know when they get divorced.”
Just before the Gazette’s visit, Baczek was on a FaceTime call with a client who wanted to buy a painting by Scott Prior — an artist featured in the current show — and needed advice on where to hang it.
“I’m looking at her unmade bed — there’s not many businesses where you have that level of intimacy with your clients. That, I was good at,” he said.
Still, Baczek said that one of the best things his alma mater did for his career was making him take art history classes every semester.
“When I talk to these artists, I know what artists they’re looking at. I know who their influences are. I know all about their oil paints or their egg tempera paints, and it gives me a connection to them,” Baczek said, noting that he comes from “their side of the tracks,” rather than being someone who just likes to purchase art.
In 1996, Baczek started his own gallery, which was then at 229 Main St. in Northampton, now the location of Absolute Zero. The gallery moved to its current location, 36 Main St., in 2003. Now, it’s “a very lean business,” Baczek said, noting that the there are only two staff members: himself and his assistant, Peter Fath.
“We stay lean, and we stay very focused,” Baczek said. “We don’t try to be all things to all people. We know what we are, and we try to be good at it.”
In the last three decades, the most significant change that Baczek has seen in the art world is the impact of the internet. Back then, if a potential client liked a painting but wanted a little more time to think about buying it, Baczek would take a Polaroid of it. “It would be a horrible Polaroid,” he said. “But it would be something.” Now, the first painting in each show has a QR code, and scanning it brings up a link to images of every painting in the show, along with its description, artist name and price.
“When we first opened, we showed exclusively local art. But you can’t stay open for 30 years and only sell local art to local people,” he added. “There’s only so many local people you can sell art to. So we had to adapt, and there comes the internet — and I love the internet, and the internet is incredibly useful to my business.”
The internet has helped Baczek connect with artists around the world. In fact, he said he routinely browses Artnet and Instagram for fun. Decades ago, artists who wanted to show work at his gallery would send him a sleeve of slides of their work. Today, they simply send a link to their Instagram account.
“Not only do I look at the work, I look at how many followers they have,” he said. Jana Brike, a Latvian artist who is part of the 30th anniversary show, has hundreds of thousands of followers, he noted. “We get maybe between 5 and 50 people a day in the gallery. In 30 years, I’m not sure [hundreds of thousands of] people have walked in the gallery!”
When the Gazette visited, Baczek pointed out Scott Prior’s realistic paintings of flowers in bottles, hung opposite two abstract works by Laura Burton, which feature digital prints on canvas with hand-applied Austrian crystals. He commented that a visitor might be confused about what the two have in common.
“One of the things that I try to do with my gallery is to make a strong connection between something like that and something like that,” he said, indicating the paintings, “and what is that connection? It’s the attention to craft in detail, because those are very, very well-crafted.”
“Very few things in my gallery qualify as the ‘I could do that’ kind of art,” he added.
The show had its opening reception on Saturday, May 2. As Baczek talked to visitors and artists, including those he’s known for decades, he kept thinking of a line from “The Sopranos”: “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of communication.”
“When you’re in a room with people that you’ve known for 40, 50 years, there’s a lot of that, and so, to respectfully disagree with Tony Soprano, there is a lot of ‘remember when,’” he said. “And when it’s something significant like this, I think those sentences are important.”
William Baczek Fine Arts is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Sunday from 12 to 5 p.m. For more information, visit wbfinearts.com.
