The works at this website are from the private collection of my father, David Sewell, who was a personal friend of the artist during the 1970s and 80s. James Lee Byars and his partner, BB Wagner, lived in my dad’s apartment in West Los Angeles during the 4 month period from Oct. 1977 to Jan. 1978. During this time the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) gave my father a grant to write a monograph about the artist’s life and work. Although my dad never completed the book — which he attributes to my birth in 1979 — he taped extensive interviews with Byars, which ended up in the large Byars archive at UC Berkeley.

The day before his departure from my father’s apartment in 1978, Byars produced a large leather suitcase that had been stored in the garage of Eugenia Butler, his Los Angeles gallerist. The suitcase was stuffed with more than a decade of notes, letters, photos, remnants of past works, etc. Byars wanted to throw the entire suitcase away, but my father intervened, realizing the value of its contents.

This suitcase was stored in our house in Southern California for 11 years. In 1988 James Elliott, curator of the Modern Art Museum at UC Berkeley, was given a generous grant to mount the first extensive Byars exhibition. Elliott contacted my father and arrangements were made for him and Michael Floss, Assistant Curator, to come to our house to collect the suitcase as a donation. Before it was taken to Berkeley, my father removed a number of duplicate items, as well as several “one only” works to keep for himself.

A few years ago, the taped interviews that my father conducted with Byars in the late 1970s were discovered in the UC Berkeley Archive by the curator Magali Arriola. They were subsequently published in transcribed form by MoMA PS1 and the Jumex Museum of Contemporary Art in Mexico City as part of their joint Byars retrospective in 2014. My father helped to resolve ambiguities in the recordings; gave a talk when the exhibition was inaugurated in Mexico City; and also loaned several items in this collection for the retrospective — namely, The Getrude Stein Book, Miracle on a Golden Thread, and the Prayer Cone.