Farm Project Space and Gallery
15 Commercial Street
Wellfleet, Massachusetts
For some art enthusiasts, Wellfleet, sometimes referred to as “the gallery town,” isn’t the town it used to be. Except for some isolated pockets, Wellfleet galleries tend toward the safe summer market: Cape Cod landscapes and illustrative user friendly art; since the Cherry Stone Gallery closed shop a few years ago, there hasn’t been a serious contender for a gallery putting contemporary art to the fore with such serious intent while having the work to back it up.
Farm Project Space and Gallery, or simply Farm, goes some way to correcting that, even without the roster of blue-chip artists that helped sustain the Cherry Stone. What it does have is a penchant for process-orientated abstraction and work that is smart, serious and playful. But what really distinguishes Farm is its placement of art over commerce, and its facilitating art in a way that’s broader than just showing and selling art out of the three rooms that make up its small exhibition space.
Friends and fellow artists Christine Gallagher and Susie Nielsen, under the guise of community and collaboration, started Farm in Portland, Oregon in 2005. “We wanted this community of different kinds of artists: people that are not all like-minded, are not all same skill-set, working together; some kind of teaching maybe, but not in the real traditional academic setting; someplace you could work on-site, a workshop type of place,” Nielsen said.
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